eBituaries

» see ebituaries.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

eBituaries wanted to replace the newspaper death notice with a web page. Its own argument, from the About page: the old world obituary is "an impersonal 'classified ad' in one day's issue of a newspaper", where a memorial on the internet could hold whatever you wanted for as long as you wanted, public or behind a password for the family. The pricing followed from that. Beat the newspaper's rate, charge a publishing fee, take nothing from advertisers.

That last part was written down as policy, and it is the best sentence on the site. "Our policy forbids the use of banner and other forms of Internet advertising. It would be like profiting by putting rows of billboards in the middle of a cemetery."

The catalog around it got strange in the way one-person internet businesses of 2001 did. You could create an eBituary for a person or for a pet. You could create a PreBituary for yourself while alive. There were Fictional and Symbolic memorials, Family Trees, Family Crests, translation services, a directory of mortuaries, a charity directory for memorial donations, flowers through FTD, and a Disc Submission Form for mailing in your photographs, because scanning them was still beyond most households. The whole thing was built in Microsoft FrontPage and the HTML still carries the webbot comments that prove it.

~ the case file ~

~ who ran it ~

Nobody knows. The contact page is a wall of twelve role addresses, Info@ and Support@ and PicSubmit@ and NewCharity@ and Artists@ and so on down, and not one human name appears anywhere on the site. I have read a lot of dead sites for this archive and this is the first one I could not attach a person to.

There is a page arguing that eBituaries is a Green Business, on the grounds that email was already replacing untold millions of letters and that whole populations were about to commute electronically to their Green Collar Jobs. It predicts that the entire Library of Congress will download to your wristwatch faster than the watch can beep the hour. It opens by noting that "2001 will bring the first year of the 3rd Millennium", which was a thing you could still say to strangers at the time.

~ disabled by the systems administrator ~

The end is recorded by the web host rather than by the owner. In February 2003 the domain served a page headed "This Domain is Temporarily Not Available", explaining that there was nothing wrong with your connection, that the domain had been disabled by the systems administrator, and that the owner should call Hostcentric immediately or risk losing all data on this website. It came back. The last working capture of the real site is 11 June 2003, and on the 23rd the same suspension page returned, this time with the host's name edited out of it.

Nothing paid it off. By 28 January 2004 ebituaries.com was a GoDaddy parking page, and whatever memorials had been published went with the hosting account. A site whose entire pitch was that the internet would remember for as long as you wanted is now reachable only through somebody else's archive of it.

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