Well, one more paper down, one more to go! Today I completed the final paper for my class on information law and policy, which was one of my best classes this semester. It was a pretty tough one that required a lot of reading and a lot of extra work for the assignments, but I found it quite rewarding in the end.

The attached assignment is in a similar vein to the one I posted on Tuesday, but approaches the topic from a slightly different angle. The assignment in this case was to present an analysis of some of the policy problems that are raised by a project of our choice. Since I had already done a lot of thinking about the policy implications of how we handle online assets after a death, I decided to analyze some of the problems that are raised, and to postulate some solutions of my own.

Yesterday I had an epic writing session, and finished my final paper for my class on the social and organizational issues of information.

The topic of my paper was a bit on the morbid side, but somehow that's what I'm doing a lot of work on this semester. The concept for the paper is that as more and more people create and have online profiles on social networking sites, a system is created where more and more people have an online memorial when they die, whether they intend to or not.

This topic became interesting to me about a year ago when my friend Blake Bigler died of a sudden heart attack (at the age of 25). Immediately afterwards, his Facebook page became a memorial to him where friends posted messages, pictures and the like. To this day, friends still wish him a happy birthday, and post notes on his page.

I thought that this was a dramatic change to the way that deaths occur and are memorialized, and that it needed to be analyzed more carefully, and so my paper was born. If you're interested, please feel free to read the attached.