Gone are the days when a death announcement was simply made by a small, expensive piece in the local newspaper. We are in 2007, and the world, and the way people now live their lives has changed massively thanks to the internet. People use the internet for everything, from shopping to socializing and now, mourning. This is thanks to new online memorial sites which undoubtedly make for fantastic tributes, 21st Century style.

Obituaries tend to be dull, contain very few words and only read by local people. Friends and relatives living abroad will not get the chance to see the obituary. These compare to online memorial websites which contain photos, videos, music, memories from all of the family and tributes and condolences. All of which can be nicely arranged amongst custom images and background music. The next step is to simply insert the email addresses of friends and family and hit send. Instantly, everybody has access to the memorial and can contribute accordingly from any computer which has an internet connection.

As I continue to make comparisons between obituaries and online memorials, it is important to highlight the time in which the online memorial remains online, in comparison to the time a newspaper obituary remains accessible. Many sites can guarantee that a memorial will remain online forever for a one time sponsorship fee which tends to be very reasonably priced. For this price, the memorial is backed up on back up servers. Newspaper obituaries are only as safe as the person who is looking after the physical newspaper. That does not mean to say that technology is fool proof, as it is certainly not. Today, most major online memorial websites will provide backup servers which greatly reduce the chances of data loss, as the chances of 2 hardware failures at the same time is extremely small, if not impossible.