In his article, “Dead Men Don’t Blog”, he made a point that many internet publishers and marketers might agree with. He essentially points out that many of us have built web-based archives of our personality, our plans, our dreams and our intellectual property, without thinking about what happens to it all if we pass away.

I had actually been thinking about this a lot lately. Ever since my father passed away last year (that’s him in the picture on the left – My wedding day and he wanted his “Kalabari tuxedo”), I’ve wondered what to do with his archive of books, writings, papers (including written on newspapers – think “a beautiful mind” if you ever saw that movie).

You see my father was a scholar, minister, war-time rebel, developmental activist, government official and many other things during his time. He was most of all a thinker and writer. Apart from published scholarly works, he wrote tons and tons that were never (and may never be) published.

It wasn’t even hours after he died before close collaborators and friends in the academic world were reminding me that we should not toss out his work. In his case, it’s a bit easier because these materials are physical, and therefore easier to find (but not easier to organize, digitize or store).

Unfortunately it may end up costing thousands and thousands of dollars to archive, organize and store this material.

I’ve also found that I’ve picked up my father’s penchant for thinking and writing. I have notebooks and papers, poetry collections, business principles, theories and ideas all over the place. I know that if I died today my wife would not even know how to find all my websites.

I recommend you read the Ray Edward blog post, and let me know your thoughts here as well. What do you intend to do?

As for me, I’m going to create a backup system listing all my domain names, account info, etc.
I’ll also begin to create a system for re-organizing all my notebook content into separate notebooks for separate subjects…especially the money ideas. There are multiple million dollar ideas that I’ve removed from my brain and left lying around on notepads, and looseleaf binders all over the place.

We’ll see how it goes.