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Grim Reaper Web Sites (7/21/00)

Strange, but one of the most popular topics on the Web is death. You can check out the gravesites and tombstones of famous people, look at your own mortality clock, shop at the L.A. Coroner's Gift Shop, explore the Heaven's Gate suicide plans, or commune with the memory of Timothy Leary. Originally broadcast in 2000.


This movie is part of the collection: Net Cafe

Keywords: Episodes: 2000; grim reaper; death
Contact Information: stewart@cheifet.com

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

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Segments

City Of The Silent
Joel Gazis-Sax sees cemeteries as one of our most valuable windows to the past. He has created a site with a variety of resources about cemeteries. At the heart of his site is the "Post-Mortem" area -- a large and ever-expanding set of links to other, serious-minded, cemetery sites. He also offers tips on visiting graveyards and making rubbings of headstones. There's a glossary of symbols, a mailing list, and an area where you can contribute inscriptions that you have seen. Sites like Joe's offer people doing genealogical research on the Internet not just a route to raw information but an appreciation of graveyards that they may not have had before.

Jerry Garcia's Haight Street Shrines
Joe Melloy, a musician and multimedia producer, is a lifelong Grateful Dead fan who lives near the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. Joe created a memorial site for Jerry Garcia upon the singer's death in 1995. The site includes digital photographs of the Haight-Ashbury district and the Garcia memorial concert in Golden Gate Park, including a 360-degree picture of the scene. One of the most popular features of the site was a guest book area where people could add their condolences, thoughts, or feelings about Garcia. His site was quickly linked to by hundreds of Deadheads and within a day or two he was getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Melloy continues to update the site with Grateful Dead material.

Organized into graveyards, Tombtown lets you to take a "fly-though" tour or travel into, above, and around the site you choose. Virtual tombstones include the name of the person memorialized. When the user clicks on a stone, a screen pops up with a photo and details about the person for whom the stone is named. Users can request new tombstones at a cost of $20 each for development time. The site also inlcudes a VR memorial to Princess Diana.

The Well's Popcult Death Pool
Interested in betting on someone else's demise? Join one of the "death pools" on the Internet. A death pool is a game based around guessing when particular famous people are going to die. These games are so popular that they have their own subsection in Yahoo. Players compete for money, gifts, or prestige depending on the pool master. Christian's site, available to members of The Well only, offers a chance to compete with a limited payback.

Virtual Pet Cemetery
Christine, also known as The Housewife, has had a Webcam going for the past six months. Her Website normally receives 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day from people who watch her go through her daily routine. The site offers both streaming video (by subscription only) as well as images from the Webcam. Why does she allow people to peek into her life? Christine says she likes the interaction and visitors being able to see, hear, and chat with her.