Sentiment - Video and photo montage production

I just heard that John Barry died, it made me cry. I don’t normally get upset by famous people dying , I deal with the real people in life and death and that’s emotional enough. I didn’t cry because of his loss I cried because of his amazing influence on me and my gratitude for his life.

 I think Out Of Africa was one of the first videos I remember seeing. I was probably about 7 years old. It was not something I would have chosen to watch, I was more interested in the Care Bears but my mom was a working single parent and the only time we’d actually have time to sit with her and chill out and have a  cuddle was on the sofa with a video.

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The Rosetta Stone

So forget heading off to the cemetery to pop some flowers on your loved ones grave sitting there and reminiscing in your own head -  what about pulling out your phone and checking out their old facbook pages, twitter updates blogs etc on the virtual grave – its all possible with a bit of bluetooth technology

it’s the kinda tombstone with Bluetooth and solar panels and stores your logs; friends and family can come over and access your virtual life from it and keep each other updated with anecdotes about you by uploading their stories to the tombstone. !!!

E-TOMB…

Yes I know, this is going to make lot of people go ‘ooooh what a horrid idea’ but i have to admit – I love it, being an avid facebooker , blogger and twitterer I love the idea becase so much of our lives are impressed upon the internet.

What do you think??

When my mom’s old friend died a few months back it seemed that in those weeks surrounding her death Facebook continuously suggested that I become friends with her – I found it eerie that it had never happened before and now that she was dead she was there almost every day on Facebook smiling away at me suggesing I become her friend!

In truth I liked it, it reminded me of her and reminded me of what her kids were going through, reminded me to drop them an email and see how they were getting on, (and also to call my own mom to tell her I loved her). However in time she sort of faded away from Facebook. 

Having read the New York Times article (from the Connecting Directors  blog)  today that addresses this issue, I decided to see what had happened to her account . It is in fact, still live. I wondered if her family knew what to do with it and this got me thinking what I’d want my family to do with my own account.  Personally, I’d like my account to be left up, then my friends and family can still message me and look at all my old photos and shenanigans – Maybe they’ll be wireless in heaven so I can plug in and have a read – Id like to think so

So what do you do when a family member dies? Maybe you just want to leave things as they are in the land of social network… but  did you know that you can memorialize a Facebook profile:

Here’s how – We’ve taken the information direct from Facebook

Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only. Please note that in order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. We do honour requests from close family members to close the account completely.

 Removing the account:
Immediate family members may request the removal of a loved one’s account. This will completely remove the account from Facebook so that no one can view it. We will not restore the account or provide information on its content unless required by law. If you are requesting a removal and are not an immediate family member of the deceased, your request will not be processed, but the account will be memorialized. 

What would you like to happen with your own Facebook account? Does anyone have your login details so they could access it if needs be and how comfortable would to feel if you saw your recently deceased best friend pop up to reconnect with you? or do you feel that facebook is for the living and online memorials best left to websites such as MuchLoved

The New York Times article below addresses the issues.

As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out

Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.

The friend had died in April.

“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.

That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms.

Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle the ghosts in its machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.

“It’s a very sensitive topic,” said Meredith Chin, a company spokeswoman, “and, of course, seeing deceased friends pop up can be painful.” Given the site’s size, “and people passing away every day, we’re never going to be perfect at catching it,” she added.

James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University, said the company was experiencing “a coming-of-age problem.”

“So many of Facebook’s early users were young, and death was rare and unduly tragic,” Mr. Katz said.

Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.5 million signing up in May alone, three times as many as in May 2009, according to the research firm comScore. People over 65, of course, also have the country’s highest mortality rate, so the problem is only going to get worse.

Tamu Townsend, a 37-year-old technical writer in Montreal, said she regularly received prompts to connect with acquaintances and friends who had died.

“Sometimes it’s quite comforting when their faces show up,” Ms. Townsend said. “But at some point it doesn’t become comforting to see that. The service is telling you to reconnect with someone you can’t. If it’s someone that has passed away recently enough, it smarts.”

Ms. Purvin, a 36-year-old teacher living in Plano, Tex., said that after she got over the initial jolt of seeing her friend’s face, she was happy for the reminder.

“It made me start talking about him and thinking about him, so that was good,” she said. “But it was definitely a little creepy.”

Facebook’s approach to the deaths of its users has evolved over time. Early on it would immediately erase the profile of anyone it learned had died.

Ms. Chin says Facebook now recognizes the importance of finding an appropriate way to preserve those pages as a place where the mourning process can be shared online.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, members begged the company to allow them to commemorate the victims. Now member profiles can be “memorialized,” or converted into tribute pages that are stripped of some personal information and no longer appear in search results. Grieving friends can still post messages on those pages.

Of course, the company still needs to determine whether a user is, in fact, dead. But with a ratio of roughly 350,000 members to every Facebook employee, the company must find ways to let its members and its computers do much of that work.

For a site the size of Facebook, automation is “key to social media success,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.”

“The way to make this work in cases where machines can’t make decisions is to tap into the members,” he said, pointing to Facebook’s buttons that allow users to flag material they find inappropriate. “One way to automate the ‘Is he dead’ problem is to have a place where people can report it.”

That’s just what Facebook does. To memorialize a profile, a family member or friend must fill out a form on the site and provide proof of the death, like a link to an obituary or news article, which a staff member at Facebook will then review.

But this option is not well publicized, so many profiles of dead members never are converted to tribute pages. Those people continue to appear on other members’ pages as friend suggestions, or in features like the “reconnect” box, which has been spooking the living since it was introduced last October.

Ms. Chin said Facebook was considering using software that would scan for repeated postings of phrases like “Rest in peace” or “I miss you” on a person’s page and then dispatch a human to investigate that account.

“We are testing ways to implement software to address this,” she said. “But we can’t get it wrong. We have to do it correctly.”

The scanning approach could invite pranks — as the notification form already has. A friend of Simon Thulbourn, a software engineer living in Germany, found an obituary that mentioned someone with a similar name and submitted it to Facebook last October as evidence that Mr. Thulbourn was dead. He was soon locked out of his own page.

“When I first ‘died,’ I went looking around Facebook’s help pages, but alas, they don’t seem to have a ‘I’m not really dead, could I have my account back please?’ section, so I opted for filling in every form on their Web site,” Mr. Thulbourn said by e-mail.

When that didn’t work, Mr. Thulbourn created a Web page and posted about it on Twitter until news of the mix-up began to spread on technology blogs and the company took notice. He received an apology from Facebook and got his account back.

The memorializing process has other quirks. Memorial profiles cannot add new friends, so if parents joined the site after a child died, they would not have permission to see all the messages and photos shared by the child’s friends.

These are issues that Facebook no doubt wishes it could avoid entirely. But death, of course, is unavoidable, and so Facebook must find a way to integrate it into the social experience online.

“They don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but yet they are the keeper of those living memories,” Mr. Katz, the Rutgers professor, said. “That’s a real downer for a company that wants to be known for social connections and good news.”

Source: NYTimes.com

Here is the 3rd installment of  the 10 playlists we plan to share with you over the next few months. - 

 Sentiments music for the soul – a collaberation of funeral and healing music gatherd from all ages, walks of life and from Sentiment.

 Life is a terminal condition… So do the best you can with the time you have left, with the things you have, with the people you love…

I found this quote a while back and kept it, and today it seems appropriate to share it. 

We had some sad news this week, a family friend died suddenly on Monday. she was all of 54, my mum’s age. Jane was one of my mum’s oldest closest friends, It’s a shock and everyone is wondering around feeling totally lost.

My heart goes out to her husband and kids and all her friends

The thing i will always be grateful for is that Sentiment  changed my attitude, I have what’s seen as a ‘different’ and sometime unnerving  attitude on life and that sometimes can makes my friends and family feel awkward – I face that I may not be here tomorrow, yes its morbid eyes, but for me it works, it helps me live a positive life, ensuring there is peace with everything and everyone.

We just don’t know when we’re going, where we’re going or how – so even if for today,  treat it like it’s your last, call those people you love, do something simple and beautiful like look out the window and actually see the colour of the trees – because you’d be sure to miss it when its gone

My Next playlist music for the soul playlist is dedicated to Jane, her family and the friends she left behind

Music for the soul part 3 playlist is in the next blog here is the link

Hi to everyone,

This is the 2nd installment of ‘The Power of Music’.

There are a total of 10 playlists to be shared over the next few months.

Sentiment’s Music for the Soul playlists are complied of music choices for funerals and celebrations of life, shared by everyone who follows us on Twitter, Facebook, friends, family, clients past and present and funerals we have worked on in the past 4 years.

There is a wide age of people who have added to these playlists from 90 year old to 19 year olds – enjoy the variety

The Power of Music – Playlist 2

It’s half term this week so I’ve been hanging out with lots of mums – Hot topic in the mummy world? You guessed it… ‘Jade Goody’!

To be fair I’ve not seen much of the Jade thing as I’m not one for the media – I don’t buy the papers, I rarely watch the news and I certainly don’t buy magazines due to the wise words of a Baz luhrmann’s song ‘Sunscreen’ – “don’t buy beauty magazines they only make you feel ugly”

So I did a bit of investigating into the media and my reaction was – wow, it’s everywhere! Also, where people can have an opinion they do! There are some beautiful messages to her, but also on a few blogs and social networking sites people seem to be up in arms about the media coverage she has encouraged… why? Because they all like a good chance to criticise and think they are so much better!

I am about to face some facts – the fact is all the people I work with or the people I work for are either dead or dying. They are not ‘passed on’ and they are not ‘lost’ – they are dead! It hurts for me to say it but from now on I’m going to say it! No skirting round the truth!

When I say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, what I really mean is ‘I really am bloody sorry your mum died and I see your pain’. But I don’t want to say it because I feel it may hurt them and I don’t want to hurt them anymore than they are already hurting – So I skirt round the truth, fluff it up and say anything but the reality of the situation!

When we speak to the bereaved, we say ‘she had a great life’ or ‘she was loved’. Yarda yarda yarda – If there’s a window of opportunity not to be sad then hands up, I’ll take it, as will everyone else if they are to be honest. Its the easy option… but what about the people we are driving off from? Leaving them on the side of the road to find their own way home just to save an uncomfortable journey!?