What to do when your Net-celeb dies

PROLIFIC BLOGGER and freelance writer Russell Shaw passed away in San Jose on Friday, March 14. I learned the news in, well, yes, C|Net’s Blog here, and have been watching the reports of Russell’s passing steadily ripple throughout the blogging communities he traveled in as the first report, like a rock dropped into a pond, caused a steady series of outward waves.

Right now, I’ve seen Russ’s death noted in at least three to four telecom blogs over the past three hours – call it a blog-posting-per-hour for him. Then go multiply by four or six or ten, as aggregator sites pick up the original blog posts and propagate them hour by hour as the batch jobs run. I figure by morning here in the States, Russ will have generated at least a couple of pages of The Google to look over.

I think Russell would, if he were still around to enjoy it, be flattered by the outpouring of condolences within the telecom blog-o-sphere. I would hope he’d appreciate the fact the telecom community were the first to remember him through the medium that he used the most.

Let me be candid here. Russell and I were not drinking buddies or best buds or even blog-o-buds. I knew him because I was editor at a magazine I am leaving and he did some writing for the pub for a period of time.

I suspect there will be a lot of people who said “Russell did some writing for us” because he did a boatload of stuff for a lot of people. He was blogging at ZDNet , the Huffington Post and TMCnet . It looks like his last post was at TMCNet talking about Internet regulation.

And I would think over the next few days, Russell might have enjoyed the intellectual question all of these Blogging pubs are going to have to deal with his sudden departure: What do you do when your Net-Celeb dies?

Right now the blogging community is propagating Russell’s departure. But do you pull out his JPEG and drape it in black? More interestingly, what happens on the social networking communities?

A colleague of mine from the clone wars, er DIGEX days passed away over a year ago, yet he continues to live on LinkedIn. Anthony Alberico’s profile remains active despite his death on December 23, 2005. I note this not with any sort of irony or bitterness – it just is. Nor do I have an elegant solution at this time, for I would prefer to remember him as a “Connection” rather than to see his profile simply vanished with a few keystrokes. µ