My friend Ethan Kaplan over at blackrimglasses has a fascinating post about the death of a geek — a man named Mark Hoekstra — and the strange feeling that is created by seeing his blog posts, Flickr photos, Last.fm contributions and other elements of his online life floating around in the ether after his death (just 34 years old, he apparently died suddenly of a heart attack while riding his bicycle). As Ethan says:

“The thing about Mark’s death: I did not know him, but I do know everything that was “last” in his too short life. I know the last song he listened to was Instant Death by the Beastie Boys. I know that Last.fm last saw him Monday evening. He has a cat, whom I hope is taken care of. Five days ago he posted a picture of a Cisco Aironet he got from Ebay.”

I’ve had this same experience several times now — in some cases with people I know well and in others with people I barely know at all, and yet somehow feel that I know, as a result of the photos and blog posts and other elements of their lives that continue to exist online. I recall coming across Adrian Sudbury’s blog, which he wrote up until his death from leukemia, and Leroy Sievers blog, which he wrote until his death from cancer, and I remember being affected quite strongly by the blog post that soldier Andrew Olmsted wrote for publication after his death.

In some ways, the blog entries and other online ephemera from people like Mark Hoekstra are more affecting than the deaths of famous people like author David Foster Wallace — or even journalists like Leroy Sievers — whose passing generates a certain amount of heat and light on the Web as a result of their public presence. What happens to Mark’s blog posts or photos or Last.fm recommendations after his death? Will traces of him be left for others to find, and for how long?

I wrote a memorial webpage for my father after he died of cancer in 1996 and have kept it online since then, just in case someone might run across it who knew him, but is there any point to that other than the feeling I have that some part of him is still alive? I set up a website in memory of my father-in-law after he died of cancer two years ago, with the text from various eulogies, photos slideshows and so on. It sits there still, like a moment trapped in amber, and for some reason I can’t bring myself to delete it, just in case someone comes across it in their Web travels.

Last words have a certain poetic appeal, if only because we imagine them being uttered by the deceased with his or her last breath. But what if you could write your final thoughts in the form of a letter to the world, to be published after your death? That’s exactly what military blogger Andrew Olmsted did, and that post is now up on his blog. It’s like a monologue delivered by a ghost, with all of the witticisms and interjections of a normal blog post — plus a few too many quotes from Babylon 5 for my liking — but the added gravitas of a eulogy. Poetic? Perhaps. Certainly fascinating. There are also some comments from Andrew’s friends and family on one of his last pieces for the Rocky Mountain News.

Amid all the commentary about Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin that I came across on the Web over the past day or so, one blog post stood out: a post by Weblogs Inc. founder and current AOL employee Jason Calacanis, who is now running the Digg-style Netscape news portal. His commentary — which he cross-posted to Netscape.com — was entitled “The Discovery Channel killed Steve Irwin.” In it, he makes the argument that the network, in its shameless drive for ratings, helped encourage Steve Irwin to do ever more dangerous things, and therefore it is culpable in his death.

As more than one of Jason’s 81 commenters noted, this is a load of bollocks. For one thing, it’s obvious to anyone who has had a look at Irwin’s history that he would have done all the things he was filmed doing over the years whether he had a TV show or not, including dangling his child in front of a crocodile. And two, he died in a freak accident while filming a documentary for a kid’s show, and wasn’t even doing anything that dangerous (stingrays are not violent, and deaths are extremely rare).

The only conclusion I can come to is that Jason deliberately posted his commentary with the inflammatory headline in order to get comments, traffic and votes on Netscape. Isn’t that like insider trading or something?

Update:

Jason has responded in the comments, saying he isn’t interested in traffic and that he stands by his point that the Discovery Channel encourages dangerous activity. I should note that he’s not the only one who feels this way: Ray Mears, a TV documentary producer, told the Telegraph that Irwin “clearly took a lot of risks and television encouraged him to do that,” and that “The voyeurism we are seeing on television has a cost and it’s that cost Steve Irwin’s family are paying today.” Cultural figure Germaine Greer also criticized Irwin, saying in her Guardian column that “the animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin.”

Lots of chatter in the blogosphere about whether blogs are dead, whether blogs can ever achieve anything, whether blogs will mean the death of civilization as we know it, whether my blog can beat up your blog, and so on – all of which was sparked by this article in Slate magazine.

The point of the piece seems to be that blogs as a business, in terms of making money and being acquired, is over. Fair enough. As many have pointed out, however – including my friends Tris Hussey, Mark Evans and Rob Hyndman, as well as Steve Borsch, Dan Gillmor and Steve Rubel – there is a lot more going on than Slate seems to think. Whether it’s “monetizable” or not (and how) remains to be seen.

I find it interesting that only a couple of people, including Rob, Paul Kedrosky and Munir at Blogging Journalist have mentioned an even more in-depth look at how blogs aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be, which appeared in the Financial Times (written by Trevor Butterworth, who as Paul points out has a name that is almost too British to be believed), under the headline “Time for the last post.” In it, he quotes Choire Sicha (ex of Gawker and now at the New York Observer) as saying blogs are essentially a waste of time and accomplish little.

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said from across a folding table vast enough to support the battle of Waterloo in miniature (the apartment owes much to eBay, the Ikea of bohemia). “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.” The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things – the purview of old media – is arguably much more important.”

It’s fine to say – as the article does – that blogs aren’t a revolution, won’t kill the “dinosaurs” of old media, and other lame truisms. But Sicha’s point is a different one: that blogs are bad because they fragment things, that they aren’t connected the way they pretend to be, and that old media needs to be there to “see the totality of things.” As tied to the early success of Gawker as he might have been, this shows that Sicha never really got it to begin with. Do there need to be aggregators or filters or sources that coalesce some of the fragmentation that democracy brings? Yes. Does that have to be “old media?” No. Sicha and others are short-changing themselves and others with their narrow-minded views.