Ars Technical outlines what Facebook, MySpace and Twitter do with the information associated with your account after you die.

Published in 2010.

posted after “RT @philgyford: Obituaries/memorials for people who delete their online selves. “Mark Pilgrim. 1991-2011. He will be missed.””

silner:

Removing my online self is an option I’ve often considered and I think, if it was possible to do it cleanly and leave no trace, I might well do the deed. It’s the imperfection of the process that puts me off as much as anything

(Source: untanglingtheweb)

Graham Linehan, the celebrated writer of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, and collaborator on Big Train and other uniquely British comedies, spoke with sci fi author Cory Doctorow at The Story conference in London in February about storytelling process. Increasingly, the Web has taken a central role.

Antony Mayfield took some great notes from the conversation. Here’s a taster of what Linehan said:

• He spends six months of constructive procrastination – he calls it “systematised goofing off” gathering ideas while mainly surfing the web.
• Everytime he gets an inspiration it goes on a card. Cards are colour coded by characters.
• An example would be a YouTube video he saw of a child crawling into an amusement arcade machine where a claw grabs the prizes – that became a set-piece in The IT Crowd where Moss dives into one after an iPhone…
• When he has about 100 cards, it is time to begin…
• The cards are laid out on the floor and he begins to string set pieces into episodes, about ten per episode (presumably they get thinned out).
• Once he has the stack of set pieces per episode he has ” a good place to start”

But in addition to the Web being his resource for inspiration and research, the man known as @glinner on microblogging site Twitter also told the audience that he chose his writing collaborators for the next series of The IT Crowd out of the people who make him laugh in his twitterfall.

Juliebee documented a couple of his examples:

He’s recently been using Basecamp to collaborate with other writers (“people who make me laugh on Twitter”), starting with a blog or an image, allowing a conversation to grow in the comments. It takes it some way to becoming a story.

and

He turned to Twitter for help during a last minute rewrite of ‘The IT Crowd’. On the day of recording a courtroom scene (Roy had been kissed on the bottom and sued the culprit), @Glinner asked the world of Twitter to find him alternative words for ‘arse’ in return for a credit on the DVD. He used a few, his favourite being ‘bike rack’.

The Guardian describes the fallout of accidentally landing in the Internet spotlight: Coventry teenager Stephen Holmes, Twitter and rapper Kanye West.

And what happened next.