If I were to die tomorrow, would the online world miss me? It occurs to me that an awful lot of my time and energy goes into creating an online presence. Not that I’m world renown mind you, but I have been building an online presence for a few years now and have numerous activities I handle to keep that presence going. When I do meet my demise, what will happen to these web endeavors?

Will it all just sit out there in web-limbo or should I make a codicil in my will to have someone delete them, notify them, or run them for posterity? Will my social web-friends hold some sort of online memorial service? How would that work?

Maybe I should write my last Facebook message in advance and have a proxy post it to my wall. It’ll say something like…

"Well, today turned out to be very different from what I expected. I definitely expected to live through it. But the Lord in his infinite wisdom decided differently when that bus splashed through a huge puddle of water from a recent rain causing me to jump back so far I went right over the bridge I was fishing off of and, since I can’t swim, I drowned. It sure would have been nice if someone had jumped in to save me.

I’d like to thank all my Facebook friends for posting to my wall and “liking” my recent posts. It’s been fun sharing videos, photos, and comments with y’all. I’m sorry to see it all end."

Oh, yeah, I have to remember to keep it short, as I have to say goodbye in 90 characters or less. Boy, that’s annoying. This is important!

The same holds with Twitter: "To all my Twitter friends, I will no longer be tweeting due to the untimely and unfortunate circumstance of my death."

"I’m so sorry I can’t take you up on that job offer, my LinkedIn colleague. You see, I’m no longer physically or intangibly able to work."

And while I’m at it, should I have someone take a photo at my funeral and add it to my PhotoBucket, Flickr, and MySpace photo albums?

Should I will my active online stores to someone in my family?

"…and to my brother, Steve, I leave the sum total of all remaining eBay and Etsy store inventories along with any monies accrued in my PayPal account from said stores."

I feel especially bad about what will happen to my websites, blogs, and Squidoo lenses that will now be without the regular care I give them. I wonder if it’s possible to get more traffic after you are gone. It’d be just my luck.

Will my forum buddies or chat room friends miss my input? Have I really made an impact or enough of a difference in their online lives to give them pause about my obvious absence?

What about the affiliate programs I signed up with? Will Amazon, Pepperjam, and Clickbank care? Not to mention the various individual product affiliate programs I belong to.

I have six main active email accounts I can think of off the top of my head and two which are now defunct but that I never deleted. They are with Yahoo, Aol, Gmail, and PeoplePC, some with which I have more than one account. Then there are the emails I get through some of the sites where I have memberships and newsletters I’ve subscribed to, many of which were compulsory. I almost forgot about those. And I don’t even want to think about the amount of spam emails that will just sit there in my spam folders and clutter up space on the servers of these email accounts and the world wide web. I really do clean them out regularly.

You may have more of an online presence than you are aware of. I Googled myself once and was surprised to find a blog comment about a boxer in New York that I apparently wrote in 1997. When I saw it, I had to click through because I didn’t believe I wrote something about a boxer. I’m just not the type. But there it was, and when I read it, something tickled my memory and gave me a vague recollection of having written it.

I am registered with no less than 250 online resources, (I’m guessing. This could be a conservative number) such as websites, blogs, social book-marking sites, training sites, sites for free stuff like fonts and graphics, and banking sites. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many more of them.

My Favorites list is so long I’ve had to create separate folders and break the list into categories. There are currently 33 main folders and 62 sub-folders and 47 sub-sub folders and some miscellaneous links below the list of folders. There are even more of these kinds of folders in every one of my main email accounts.

I haven’t gone mobile with my apps yet. I’m almost afraid to. I already spend way too much time keeping up with the work I do on my laptop. Blogging and web site management is a full time job.

In the end, there will probably be an offline funeral with (hopefully) lots of family, friends, and colleagues in attendance. But I guess the best I can ask of my online friends, buddies, and kin is ask them to say…I liked her. May she Rest in Online Peace.