Robespierre, a frequent contributor at Fodor’s Travel Talk Forums online, suddenly stopped posting to the boards in July of last year. NPR’s All Things Considered did an essay on why he stopped and the reactions of his fellow forum posters.

Robespierre died. People he knew online — friends and acquaintances — knew only that he’d stopped posting.

Clearly there is a need for several web 2.0 services to fill this niche.

Notification of one’s demise sent to one’s online communities, automatically, via iBit, the Online Obituary service.

Funeria to host one’s online funeral services.

The bits and pieces of one’s online persona collected from Flickr and MetaFilter and twitter and World of Warcraft and so on and deposited and cataloged at Deathbook, the reliquary updated over time as the service’s worms crawl through the deceased’s decaying virtual corpse, grimly digesting all the accumulated errata and depositing it in DB’s vast servers, where, perhaps, the accumulation will fertilize the lives and thoughts of future visitors.