I stumbled across the blog today of Alex King, who wrote an article titled “We’ve made web development complicated” (see it here), which is something I’ve been thinking about recently (I also wrote a blog article about it called “Editing websites has never been more time-consuming” (see that here).
The most interesting thing about Alex’s blog though is that, well, he’s dead.
Alex died last year, according to a bio on the site.
I find this morbidly interesting, that I can read his articles, some about life, some about web design, all written by a guy who died quite recently. He was a contributor to WordPress, and created the share icon. The SHARE icon! This guy was awesome.
It got me thinking about how many blogs I see on a daily basis, and how many comments from people I see in comment boxes and on community sites like Stack Overflow. How many of those people are still alive?
The tips, feedback and articles we read could all have been written by people not alive any more, still there on the internet forever, like a living memory that they were alive, and have contributed something.
I wonder what it’ll be like when the Internet starts to outlive more and more people, what will happen to these blogs and comments from the deceased? Will they remain as long as someone’s paying the hosting? Even if they do remain, will articles by the deceased remain high in Google’s algorithm, or will they fade away into obscurity?