Many people today live two lives. One is in the real, physical world and the other is not, as you might think, with a second husband in a semi across town, but in the "virtual" world created on the Internet.

The world-wide network of computers called the Internet has grown rapidly in the past five years, and there are now estimated to be over forty million people using it. They use it to exchange messages - email, or electronic mail - to chat to each other by typing at their computer keyboards, and also to publish words, pictures, sounds and even video clips on something which goes by the rather grandiose name of the "World Wide Web". The World Wide Web, or the Web, is a way to get information onto the screen of any Internet-connected computer, and it is being used for a vast range of things, from so-called "online news" - the BBC has its own 24 hour a day Web site to go along with the News 24 TV channel - to recipes and, of course, the seemingly ubiquitous pornography.

Anyone can put information onto the World Wide Web, and once up it can be seen from anywhere in the world. As a new medium, one which may soon grow to be as important as television or even, if you listen to some of the less restrained commentators, print itself, the Internet has to be taken seriously. Millions of documents are published here - the equivalent of a million pages of material is added every day - and more and more people use it to communicate with colleagues, friends and even family. My six year old daughter has had an email address since she was two and has several electronic penpals around the world. And the Internet has created something new, something special - something called the "virtual community". People who do not live close together can remain in regular contact through the telephone, but the quality of interaction possible over the Internet is far richer and more satisfying. Friendships can blossom online, as can love.

Now the people who live online are more and more considering what it means to die online. Not in the sense of sitting at a computer typing "I don®t feel very wellˆ eeeeuuuuurrrggggˆˆˆˆˆˆ.." but in the sense of carving out some of this computer space for themselves after they have left both the real and the virtual worlds behind. This is not the science fictional idea of downloading your brain into the computer network and living forever as a pattern of electrical impulses scattered over the world, but the more mundane - online memorials, and virtual cemeteries. There are lots of reasons why someone might want to do this. A memorial in the real world, however magnificent, can only be located in one place. Have you visited the Taj Mahal - no, and until you do you will not have paid your respects. An online memorial can be visited by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

Type the strange runes "http://www.cemetery.org/" into the program you use to look at the Web and you will find "an ideal place to announce the loss of someone we cherish and to erect a permanent memorial to their memory" at the World Wide Cemetery. Here you can put up an online memorial and even create a "family plot" by linking your cybergrave to those of relatives.

The move to virtual graves came out of a large number of informal online memorials set up, often by grieving friends or relatives, during the early years of this decade. If someone had made an impact online it seemed natural to commemorate them in the same way, initially by sending memorials to their friends through email, and then by setting up special Websites. However not all survived - trying to find the memorial site for Linda Hermes I instead got the chilling message "404 Not Found Url '/~dera/linda.shtml' not found on server" telling me that the cybergrave was no more - the electronic tombstone had crumbled. As with almost every area of online activity, someone spotted the commercial potential for creating well-tended cybergraves, and the virtual cemetery industry was born. Some of these services are online ripoffs, charging vast amounts of money to display a minimal amount of information about a loved one, and of course there is no real guarantee that a virtual grave will still be there in years to come. The World Wide Cemetery will charge $14 - visa accepted - for your memorial, but if the company goes out of business and shuts down its Internet service then it will take the graves with it. This tends not to happen to churches, where the law has established certain protocols in this sensitive area.

And also, again following the fine old Internet tradition of taking a good idea and stamping on it until anything of value has been extracted from it, like an old toothpaste tube, there are now online pet cemeteries and, in just to confuse everyone, online cemeteries for virtual pets, the Tamagotchi. So now you can commemorate the non-existent non-life of a cheap electronic toy. I think we lost the plot somewhere.

Please pay a return visit to this page for links to internet memorial sites - or email us with your favourites.

Worldwide Cemetery
A place where you can erect permanent monumnets to the dead.

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