Posted on Sun, May. 27, 2007
LIFE-DEATH LINKS
Mike Patterson, 26, never met Starsky Garcia, Bryan Pata or Bradley Timpf. But stories like theirs are familiar to the San Francisco paralegal. A little over a year ago, he started a webpage: mydeathspace.com.
The site, which links newspaper articles about dead people to their MySpace pages, has become quite popular.
There are 2,500 deaths on the site.
It gets up to 20,000 hits a day and has about 5,000 participants on its forums.
The site features an interactive map where visitors can find those who have died nearby.
Patterson started the page after reading an article about a man who killed his family. Seeking further information on the man's two dead daughters, he went on MySpace.com.
From there the page grew.
On April 16, 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech, 27 were students. At least 18 of them had MySpace or Facebook pages. As the news unfurled comments on their pages morphed from concerned questions to remembrances.
''People were sending the names in,'' Patterson said. ``They were friends, classmates.
``Within 24 hours, the number of visitors on our site went up so much our server crashed.''
Patterson spends up to three hours daily updating the site. He said reaction is mixed.
''I get complaints, people curse me, claim I'm a bad person and then I get e-mails from people thanking me,'' he said.
http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/120056.html
Reply With Quote
<br />"If you aren't going to use the head on your shoulders, I will remove it by any means necessary ." <br />
