Legacy MattersIn this new media world of ours, we have to deal with cyber-squatters and bootleg videos of funerals and those without any moral compass who have no respect for the dead.
Cathy Seipp's friend Sandra Tsing Toh writes about it in
It's a blogged world, we just live in it
On the one hand, it would be hard to confuse cathyseipp.com with her actual site. On the other hand, when the cyber-squatter last week reverted to his earlier ways, posting a "last blog entry" signed "Cathy Seipp" in which Cathy supposedly begged final forgiveness for her politics, her friends and her parenting … this seemed to cross a new line.
By week's end, Cathy's family and friends were debating whether to take legal action. Everyone was offended, exhausted and still staggered with grief. The public expression of which — Cathy's funeral — was, of course, recorded without our knowledge and posted by another blogger. Yep, it's all out there on the Web, just start Googling — you'll see snot pouring out of my nose as I wail helplessly through my eulogy, which, along with everything else involving the ceremony, has all already been critiqued online.
"It's like Cathy was the only thing that kept these people civilized!" was the horrified comment of friend Andrew Breitbart who, one should note, edits the Drudge Report. Even he!
Elliott Stein, a journalist advisor, was upset about the way Maia, Cathy's daughter, complained to her school about something the Elliott said or did. What he did was buy the domain name cathyseipp.com and write disparaging things about Cathy, her daughter and her friends up to the day of her funeral.
The unfortunate lesson, learned or not, as her friend Luke Ford, a strange and bizarre character himself, writes
If you are old enough to blog, then you are old enough to learn that whenever you blog something negative about somebody, that person may devote the rest of his life trying to make you miserable. Even when you are right in hurting someone (exposing their bad behavior to protect the innocent) through your speech, you are usually going to be hurt in return.
She did get a New York Times obit with this delicious quote
“In Medialand,...people often look at you uncomprehendingly if you explain that not everyone in America agrees with the received media wisdom. She added, “People with different ideas are not necessarily evil bigots, even if some of them do go to church.”