Protecting the bereaved and their memorial websites
Current mood: optimistic
Category: Life

When Memorial Website GoneTooSoon ran google adverts on the memorials that people had created on its site there was, unsurprisingly, a public outcry by a lot of very distressed people (MuchLoved even posted a protest at www.gonetoofar.co.uk). Gonetoosoon removed the adverts but there was a more general lesson to be learned by all memorial website providers from this episode; people using online memorial services expect to be able to trust their memorial provider, they expect them to act decently with sensitivity to their needs and to their memories of the deceased; they do not want their memorials to be treated like any old page on a commercial website. None of this seems like much to ask to me, in fact these are all founding principles of MuchLoved. But there are a growing number of companies and websites offering the bereaved the ability to create their own memorial pages and remembrance websites, many of them without any discernible ethos or guarantees of future security. MuchLoved is a charity and has all of these safeguards enshrined in its ethos and mission statement, (including provision for the safe-keeping of memorials in the long term by using The Data Trust). When GoneTooSoon ran their adverts we contacted all the main memorial websites (including GoneTooSoon) and invited them to help us build a code of conduct together, a charter to help protect the bereaved and their memories of their loved ones in the future.  Some sites never replied but a select few it seems share similar values to MuchLoved and so with them we began discussions about how we could try to prevent this sort of thing happening again; we were all determined that something positive should come out of such a negative episode. In the continuing absence of regulation we can't ensure that all sites behave ethically, but today The Memorial Code website was launched; a five point voluntary code of ethics to help safeguard online memorials. Five memorial websites have helped create and endorse the code and people can expect high ethical standards to be upheld by them on their sites. The others we hope will follow and all sites are welcome to apply if they are prepared to undertake to uphold the Code of Conduct and behave ethically and responsibly. The Current five endorsing sites will all shortly feature a Memorial Code logo on their site which will link through to their certificates of membership. So when you're choosing a tribute site to host your memories of your loved ones, look out for the following logo to give you the extra assurance that you need.

You can visit the memorial code website at www.memorialcode.org.
 

3:20 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Raising money for charities through donations
Current mood: pleased
Category: Life

Just a really quick update to say that after a seriously intensive burst of development energy we've finished creating a site designed to help other charities become MuchLoved partners and help them fundraise. A lot of people wanted to raise money through their memorials for a good cause close to them or their loved one. People often don't want flowers and wreaths at funerals anymore, they want their money to commemorate the individual by doing something good and positive and that seems like a great way to celebrate and remember them. Once we started offering this facility it became clear the charities themselves were very keen to become partners but explaining to them how it all worked was quite complex. So www.MuchLovedPartners.com was created to help charities see how MuchLoved donations work and so they could see all the other benefits of becoming a partner, not just the donations side, and how easy it is to setup and become one; it's totally free for a charity to become a partner so they have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain but we've had trouble explaining this to them or at least maybe they've just had trouble believing it! Hopefully the MuchLoved Partners site will show them it really is a genuine & I think quite fabulous thing and they will be able to raise money for their good causes - this will all be due to the generousity of the MuchLoved community and their tribute visitors who choose to donate; so a big thank you to all of you for asking us to do this. Partners can also see reports on the members of their communities who use the MuchLoved service (as long as the Tribute Guardians consent to this) and they can get information on the donations themselves so that they can thank Tribute Guardians for setting up a memorial website and opting to support their charity. I must say an exceptionally big thank you to the development and design team, as usual, they were brilliant! ;)
Back soon with more news. Sorry to be brief today and thanks for visiting!

5:13 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Memorials can now be hosted for 10 years, freely!
Current mood: happy
Category: Life

Well we've done it! MuchLoved has now launched a completely free ten year memorial hosting service, so now all MuchLoved tributes can now be hosted freely for ten years . We're amazingly grateful to the MuchLoved sponsors for this, and it's been a very hectic time updating the system to support this new service but it's what we always dreamed of offering and we're delighted... that is to say !

If you have created a MuchLoved memorial and it has deactivated or is still a Trial tribute, there are some instructions here on how to 'upgrade' to your free ten year tribute.

Plus we have a raft of other new features that have been or are about to be released including

2:27 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Memorial Website Group
Category: Blogging

I've created - or rather, I think I've created a blog group where people can post links to their tributes to their loved ones however they've created them. I hope people will join; I think a few people are using myspace to create tributes so hopefully they will see this as a nice way to put them together; and maybe a few friendships will be formed as a consequence. This is all assuming I've managed to do it right, which is never something to take for granted!

p.s. Also apologies to Tom - I've finally found how to set the default blog display font... and I think someone may even have helped me do it. Do developers have guardian angels? That would be nice. Anyway, thanks GA!

5:23 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Other memorial websites
Current mood: pensive
Category: Religion and Philosophy

This has the rather inappropriate & slightly pompous category of religion & philosophy, which is the closest category I could find related to death and bereavement. Interesting how it's (however unconsciously) treated as a taboo subject even in a supposedly anti-taboo medium. Life is listed as a category after all; why not death?! I think this is part of the problem for the bereaved; its an awkward and uncomfortable subject for everyone else, but if you've been recently (or even not so recently) bereaved you often really want to talk about it (and you really *need* to talk about it). I think that's the nice thing about the MuchLoved Community forum. Everyone's in the same boat, they can talk without the stigma without the social obstacles. Anyway, that's enough of that. This post isn't supposed to be philosophising at all and it's certainly not supposed to be banging on about the MuchLoved Community. It's actually about the other online memorial services that are currently springing up. It's interesting watching some appear. There is a new one called Respectance - it has a very corporate feel but is nicely designed in a try-a-bit-too-hard to be funky way. I dislike the marketing angle that's becoming associated with it; it's being billed as a "myspace for dead people"; I don't know where that's come from but its not entirely sensitive, and I hope & presume its not from them. Still the grief-networking or "death-networking" buzzwords (as one very ill-informed and inaccurate article recently referred to it) abound at the moment. What is interesting is that this seems to have been picked as the target for the more commercially-minded memorial websites. Respectance, I understand, has had £250,000 worth of investment which has come from a venture capital company which apparently has plans to make back its money (& presumably a tidy sum in profit) by selling "premium services". Interestingly, there seems to be no mention of a cost for any services online, or certainly not any that I could find. So I wonder what exactly these services will be. Setting up a tribute appears to be free, but is this a future premium service? Surely not? It's ironic really as MuchLoved are currently saying that tributes will cost £19 (I think), when actually all tributes created in the future (and within the last 8 weeks in fact) will be automatically placed on a sponsorship plan, and set as free for ten years. (We have just received substantial and very generous sponsorship which means we can do this, which is an amazing thing for us to be able to provide and fits in very well with our ethos as one of only two charity memorial website providers - MissYou.org.uk is the other). There will still be costs for hosting perpetual or larger High-upload or Super (video-intensive) tributes (though costs will still only reflect the direct costs to MuchLoved) - but we will be able to offer a 10 mb 10 year tribute completely freely; that's enough for a piece of music or two, loads of photos, practically unlimited text. If the music is optimised you'd get even more on! I'm so delighted - can you tell?! And why aren't we telling people this yet? - Well we just haven't finished the revised payment plan coding *quite* yet, so we thought a pleasant surprise might be nice for people who set-up a tribute now. But that's the point - it will be a pleasant surprise rather than a nasty shock... and what worries me with Respectance is if people set-up their tributes believing them to be free forever and then find a nasty charge comes along because the venture capitalists want their money back. I hope I'm wrong & there's no cause for alarm here, but we shall have to wait and see. If anyone from Respectance is out there I'd love to hear the plan...

3:13 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Little things
Current mood: chipper

Gosh. Interesting using other web systems isn't it. You realise how its the attention to detail that's really important. For instance I want to use *this* font to write my blog entries but there doesn't seem to be any default setting in My Space to specify that; so each time I have to select it. Its not a big deal but after two posts I'm finding it incredibly irritating. Why doesn't it just remember what I used last time? Why isn't there a default font setting? Am I just being ignorant - can someone help me? Tom are you out there? How do I do this. Oh Tom's busy telling everyone how to get MySpace on to a mobile. Hmm really don't care for that I just want my default font not to be Times New Roman. I think its traps like this that developers like us mustn't fall in to. There's so much that can be done: RSS feeds, Mash-ups, new super wow stuff that's interesting to do but actually its the tiny weeny little things that make a person using a site love it or hate it... Maybe I'm just too old and people don't care what font they're represented in, but in my day... [insert bit about the war etc]. Oh ok, I confess I'm not that old.
Anyway better go and check our font handling - back soon x

6:05 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

No, I just can't do it
Current mood: anxious

No, I just can't do it. I have to say Bye.
Bye x

12:09 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

My space blog
Current mood: busy

Well we've gone and done it and joined MySpace. Let's hope we're not all too old to be able to use it. Seems to be going well so far. This keyboard and mouse thing seems vaguely familar. Hmm. Still can't spell though. Or is that cool? I bet punctuation's not cool. Dammit. I'm hoping apostrophes used incorrectly is really cool - I've never been able to do them. Anyway let me introduce myself. My name is Sandy Badger and I am one of the developers for www.MuchLoved.com
Since MuchLoved is quite a revolutionary (as well as charitable) project (oh, and just a general all round nice thing), I'm going to try & record a few musings here as we continue to build and enhance it. I can't promise it will be interesting, for starters I'm going to write it, but in a few years time it may be nice to pick through our concerns of yesteryear...
Well that's it for now. I have about ten seconds every week to record a distilled version of my thoughts. I think I'm gonna have to get a lot pithier; gosh this is hard! New trick old dog. Ok. How do I sign off? Toodelpip? See ya? Catch ya later gator (with a finger-revolver?). Hmm. Another tricky netiquette thing. Ok. I'm gonna be cool. I'm not gonna sign off. I'm just gonna leave it dangling, right out there...

11:55 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment