We’ve all been taught as young children that we have to share. We learn to share our toys, our Mom’s attention, our candy, and most everything else we would have preferred to keep just for ourselves. As we grow older most of us buy into the idea that “it’s better to give than to receive.” Yet, however selfless we may think we are, most people just don’t share enough when it comes to those things that will last for generations and generations to come.
Plain and simple, you need to share - and manage what you share - if you’re going to be well remembered. Be it the pictures you take (or don’t take, but should), the articles/blogs you find interesting, the latest gadget reviews, a good book, or our thoughts on any given topic. In this article I’m going to cover a few basic things you can do to begin sharing things in your life that you’d want your grandchildren and their children’s, children’s children to know about you.
Why Bother? Who Cares Anyway?
Even if you don’t have anyone you know to share your on-line life with right now, you should still start sharing. Everything we share can be read later. With a little care, it’s not going anywhere. I know your kids and most of your “real world” friends probably won’t follow you today, but you can find plenty people to share with in your virtual world. Facebook, for example, lets you join groups where you interact with people who have common interests. Or share your thoughts on Twitter with others who share links to articles that resound with you. Through mutual sharing you often develop friendships and a following as you share snippets of your life. These new friendships are a side benefit of the process of leaving a digital legacy.
If you do it right, much of your shared content will still be intact 10, 20, even 100 years from now. When someone in the future wants to know more about you, they’ll find this information fascinating even if they could care less about it today. The ones who will be most interested in what you share are probably not even alive today. I’m betting some of my great, great grandkids will find it a treasure trove of insight into who I really am. Even my kids may ponder these ramblings when they get to be my age and want to share a bit more about Poppy and Grandma with their grandkids. When that time comes they’ll have a wealth of pictures, videos, blog articles and other material for these young’uns to get a great sense of who I was. My kids will surely learn things about me they never knew before. It will be a gift I leave for them that they’ll only fully discover years from now. A buried treasure, of sorts.
OK, How Do I Get Started?
So just how does someone start sharing information in a more meaningful way? Here’s 4 things I believe you should be doing as an absolute minimum to have the best chance of leaving a digital legacy that will survive long after you’re gone.
1. Start a blog. This is the place you bring it all together. From here you can link to everything that’s important to you. Your photos, videos, thoughts and tweets, favorite blogs and other shared items. Think of your blog as your “home” on the internet. It’s where you bring it all together. This web site is also my blog.
2. Get a Flickr account. You need to start taking digital pictures if you aren’t already. Flickr is where I store and share my pics. I love Flickr because it’s easy to use and so many other programs work with it. For example, I can send pictures I take with my BlackBerry Storm directly to Flickr. I also have a plugin for iPhoto that lets me export photos from iPhoto to my Flickr account. Open an account and upload some photos. If you don’t have a digital camera, get one and USE IT! You can get a decent point and shoot for well under $100.
3. Use Twitter and/or FriendFeed. Twitter and FriendFeed are both considered micro-blogging tools. Twitter messages are a maximum of 140 characters long so they are, by design, brief notes. Twitter is a great place to create a living biography where you can share brief thoughts about things that are meaningful to you. FriendFeed excels at promoting conversation about a topic by making it easy for readers to comment. It also allows greater than 140 character messages.
Many people have written about Twitter, but this video is probably as good an overview of how it works as I’ve found:
With these “social networking” tools, you share your thoughts with your “followers” and you also read the thoughts of those you follow. It’s a great way to become known amongst groups of people who are interconnected via these services. You’ll meet and establish friendships with others you’d never meet any other way.
The main thing to remember in our context of creating a digital legacy is that Twitter is a good place to quickly and regularly share thoughts about yourself and your interests that you and others can refer back to in the future. Twitter is very popular and ever-increasing in its number of users. I believe it will be around for a long time in some form or fashion.
4. Use Google Reader. There are so, so many interesting blogs chock full of information that YOU will be interested in. Whatever your interests, there are blogs discussing virtually any given topic. Take a minute and read my previous article about why you want to use Google Reader to surf the net. I demonstrate via video how easy it is to subscribe to a blog that interests you.
What I don’t tell you in the post is that you can share articles you come across and other items of interest on a personal web page Google Reader maintains for you. Here you’ll get your Google profile on the right side of the page and a listing of all the articles you’ve shared. To share an article all you need to do is click on the Share link at the bottom of anything you happen to be reading in Reader. It’s a simple and highly effective. Every time you add or delete something from your Google Reader shared item list it’s instantly added or removed from your shared items web page. A simple link to this page from your blog, Twitter, or in an email allows others to quickly and easily view the articles you find interesting.
Becoming Virtually Immortal
I’ve written about the need to establish your digital legacy in order to be remembered by generations to come. It takes a little effort to do it right, even though it’s not difficult. Like anything else that’s worthwhile you have to work at it a bit. I’m going to do my best to guide you through the process of getting started and share much of what I’ve learned so you don’t make the same mistakes I made. If you’re someone who just doesn’t want to do anything more than take pictures and upload them to the Internet, we can still help. While we can’t take your pictures for you or write your blog, we can get it all set up so it’s easy for you to do it. Let us know if we can help.
In conclusion, stop keeping everything to yourself and start sharing! You’ll not only enjoy the process, but you’ll also be writing and creating history. Use these free web tools to your every advantage. Create your digital legacy as you share, share, share!
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