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[Update, 7 September: categories added]

Facebook is letting in the search engines, wow

I’ve just read that Facebook is going public: we will soon be able to search Facebook entries, which could be the fastest way around to get kids to stop posting everything, uncensored, online. They can still manage their privacy settings, but they will eventually run into what I’ve just seen, trying to create a family memorial planning blog. Maybe Facebook has a secret a miracle solution which every blogging platform should then adopt. Going public is stretching a bit what Facebook is doing, but the unraveling of privacy is starting there, as Richi Jennings’s post and the comments there make clear.

The family memorial planning blog

When my mother died 12 days ago my sisters and I began to make arrangements together for all the matters that families have to think about. I quickly saw that, with four of us in different cities and me in a different time zone, we would build up a large pile of e-mail that I would find hard to manage. Searching for Jeanne’s reply to Mary’s questions, for example, would become time-consuming and difficult.

I set up a family blog which will presumably have a short lifespan, just long enough for us to sort out obituary and memorial service details. My experience with various blogs led me to WordPress as the easiest one for this purpose. The blog’s initial job was to provide a space where I could post a first draft of our mother’s obituary, written from notes they had sent, and my sisters could comment on it. That has evolved into a running series of comments on all the other preparations for a large family gathering and memorial service. Today we’re trying to work out about the music and what to do with ashes at the end of the memorial service, when we’re standing around outside the church. No one wants to be left holding the ashes while we chat. We’ve had a good laugh knowing our mother would have been amused rather than offended by this. It’s just one more strange detail to consider.

Instead of sending my sisters e-mails with my travel dates and those of my son, I posted them on the site. If something changes I can correct it there so I don’t have to worry that they will pull up the wrong e-mail later.

Advantages to creating a memorial planning blog

There are two advantages to this system, I think:

• Our e-mails don’t cross each other as we send them, causing confusion (a problem I’ve had at work on occasion)
• All the correspondence and discussion is in one place and can be consulted by any of us at any time
• None of my sisters are familiar with blogs and it took the first one just three minutes to get up and running.

The disadvantges

The one big disadvantage – and this is where I come back to Facebook – is that on a private blog you cannot set up feeds or automatic e-mail alerts.

Facebook lets its members do this, more or less, but unless they have a hidden, magic solution they will lose this, I think, when they open the site to searches. I considered Facebook instead of a WordPress blog, but it’s not really designed for family consultations versus social networking.

I have set up the memorial planning blog so that only the sisters and some of our children can view it and add comments. Given the private nature of the running conversation we’re having, that option is nice. We’re of a generation that doesn’t look at websites constantly – I’m the exception – so everyone wants to know, via e-mail – if a post has been added. I’ve just posted a reply and sent a message to the three sisters that simply says reply posted. They can then delete my message. It would be nice to skip this step. I checked the forums and wrote to WordPress and was told that there is no way around the problem, for security reasons on private blogs.

A second disadvantage is that trying to introduce family members to actively using blogs is probably not best done at a time when someone has died. All four of us have the right to create posts and comment, but having posted one comment everyone seems to have decided to just continue adding comments to the same original post. The idea of having one thread on the obituary and another on the memorial service has therefore not really worked out.

What else is out there?

There are alternatives to a memorial planning blog like this. These are mostly memorial service web sites where you can buy space and they have templates for you. You can plan services and publish information online. Some of these, in case you’re interested, are:

• memory of
• last memories

Personally, they are too American in style for my taste and it’s hard to picture my 95-year-old mother’s friends visiting something like this to sign the guestbook. Meanwhile, I discovered that if you’re of an age where friends are dying, or maybe you just like to read the obits, you can subscribe to newspaper obituaries in the US through Legacy. You get e-mail alerts from Obit Messenger.

We’re now grappling with the astonishingly high cost of publishing obituaries in several US cities, since my family moved often. We could, I’ve suggested, publish short ones, with the address of a new blog. This would be a memorial to our mother, with a longer obituary, memories shared by family members, photos and room for approved comments from family and friends. We would make it public. But are we really ready for this? Not for the first or last time we’re asking, what would our mother think?

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