Over the weekend, John Vlissides, one of the 'Gang of Four' passed away. In an interesting use of wiki, a memorial has been put up where people are placing anecdotes.  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?JohnVlissides

In a connected world where we regularly interact electronically with people beyond the borders of our respective geographies, the traditional ability to mourn and share rememberances as a physically congregated group becomes less realistic.  The need to mourn and share remembrance remains, however, and it will be interesting to see how the same technology that facilitates the connections is re-mixed to facilitate handling disconnections.

I found the Wiki As Memorial interesting, and thought back to the funerals and wakes I've attended in the past. The major focus was on celebrating the life that had been lived. While written anecdotes and stories will always have their place, when I looked back what I remembered most about those events was the stories, the facial expressions, and the tid bits of family history that would leak out.  Those small stories that may not be long enough or meaty enough to warrant writing down, but trigger a succession of smaller stories that define an individual,  a significant event, or a shared understanding. All of which is lost in words alone. 

If you look at spaces.msn.com and myspace.com, you're starting to see the dawn of things happening.  What is 'cool' for todays teens will become institutionalized, and we'll start to see people taking technology in interesting places to build these interactive histories and memorials.

Digitized media - and the rapidly decreasing costs to create and share it - mixed with third party content is how I think we'll handle it. Recording our stories, storing them in a shared media driven Wiki/RSS hybrid, linking them to information in third party stores and sharing them out to a set of individuals be they friends, families, or the world. 

There are certain stories that only come out at events like weddings and funerals, and are relayed so much better by the people who lived them and/or were impacted by them. Imagine a personalized Encarta for your family, with pervasive digital media story telling from events like these, with links to relevant information (i.e. information on where the individual came from in Italy), with links to similiar sites of their friends. Imagine taking the evolution of the spaces concept forward 10,20,50 years and the rich media historical tapestry you end up with.