Bernard Lane invites others who knew his friend, Milon Buneta, to contribute their memories to Milon's memory, a living obituary. 

Jill Walker observes:

I have a folder, marked Milon Buneta. His mother gave it to me. It includes childhood photos, school reports, prize certificates, faded flyers from school theatricals, testimonials from friends, notes in Milon's handwriting. Some of these tokens are official, formal. Others are quite personal. (Milon's Memory)

Bernard Lane has started a weblog as an obituary to his friend Milon, who died twenty years ago. Milon's mother gave Bernard a folder of photos and documents, and asked him to write about her son. No newspaper would print an obituary to a man who had died twenty years earlier, though they would print an article about Bernard's choice to start a weblog for his friend instead.

Milon Buneta, 1961-1981. Begin with a simple fact. He lived just 20 years.

I don't usually read obituaries of people I didn't know, or know of. This living obituary is different. A story unfolding. Some of the most successful digital narratives are told a little like this: someone has died, or disappeared, or lost their memory, and you must piece their story together from the bits and pieces they left behind, the photos, news clippings, stories, memories. Uncle Buddy's Funhouse: your uncle Buddy left you the contents of his hard drive. I am a Singer: the protagonist has amnesia and in reading, you mirror her exploration of half-memories tied to stamps in her passport, her diary, news items. The Impermance Agent is an obituary of a sort, told according to how you surf the web, popping up among other reading in the course of a week. Found documents, objects trouvés, looking through a folder, a file, a box, a database and piecing together a story from what you find: this seems to be a form of narrative suited well to digital media. Perhaps a living obituary will be more read, more meaningful, than one published in a newspaper and then gone forever?

Meredith Badger says: 

Bernard Lane emailed me this morning about a project. He is keeping a weblog obituary of a friend who died twenty years ago. He is hoping that people who knew Milon will contribute to the weblog. The problem is trying to contact people from so long ago.

I wrote back and said I wasn't really sure what the answer was. There is no doubt that weblogs spread information at a very rapid pace. The difficulty is in capturing their attention in the first place. It's a funny thing, because I would have thought that newspapers would be much better placed to draw attention to an interesting project than the web, but perhaps this isn't the case anymore. For what it's worth, I've linked to the site on my sidebar. I hope it works out. It's a good project. I think a weblog works well as an obituary asit reflects the way in which we (I/) remember people anyway- in small, concentrated bursts. Nothing overblown or ostentatious. Snippets.

[a klog apart Obituaries a la Blog]