Don’t speak ill of the dead online

The New York Times had an arti­cle in today’s edi­tion about a web site I’ve never heard of — Legacy.com. The Times and 300 other US news­pa­pers pay the site to post obit­u­ar­ies, and the site found a prof­itable busi­ness model in the process. Mourn­ers can pay a fee to make the “guest books” avail­able for a longer period of time. A tra­di­tional guest book allows mourn­ers to write their names and thoughts at a funerl cer­e­mony. An online guest book, like those offered by Legacy.com, let any­one with Inter­net access post a comment.

The web site devotes 30% of its annual bud­get and 60% of its employ­ees to read­ing and remov­ing over 200,000 “inap­pro­pri­ate com­ments” from the online guest books. Exam­ples from the arti­cle include the fol­low­ing com­ments, which we were all deleted by Legacy.com employees:

“Every­one gets their due,” a for­mer client writes of an embez­zling accoun­tant. Or, “I sin­cerely hope the Lord has more mercy on him than he had on me dur­ing my years report­ing to him at the Wel­fare Department.”

Oth­ers are sub­tler: “She never took the time to meet me, but I under­stand she was a won­der­ful grand­mother to her other grandchildren.”

“Read­ing the obit, he sounds like he was a great father,” says another, which is signed, “His son Peter.”

Many of the other deleted post­ings are spam, adver­st­ing cas­kets, reli­gions, and pharmaceuticals.

Another site called MyDeathSpace.com posts over 25 pro­files a day for recently departed MySpace members.

Tagged as: book, comments, fun, Internet, legacy, myspace, spam