What about a GPS based system on your mobile that tells what (great) people have lived/worked that area.
Ik like your idea.
Tommy

What about a GPS based system on your mobile that tells what (great) people have lived/worked that area.
I like your idea.
Tommy

u intend only famous people....or all the obituaries??

All the obituaries. The principal newspapers in most countries carry a small biography of at least 4/5 people every day. The idea would be to have a single place where you can see who they are honouring from Chile to France. I have been in touch with a number of different nationals who have agreed in principle to syndicate their content.

Serving it locally using GPS would be a special feature ... if one could sell unique services for local authorities to offer through their own websites.

I like the title you choose: it's really warm.
Tommy

not just 50 top,

more than that

theres alot of people in the smaller ones

Copy/ Paste submissions through specific accounts for each paper. Make sure to sell the local papers on providing everlasting recognition to their community and give them facetime recognition on the site to sweeten the deal.

The only major business/ logistic hurdle is that you'll need a fact-checking process to make sure the account holders are legit editorial staff (unfortunately, some people find nothing funnier than fake obituaries for people named Frankenstein). Also, maybe open it up beyond just papers to allow anyone to post about a passed loved one (and monitor every post manually in the beginning and later with the help of flags and sophisticated software) to limit abuse- you could even request a 5 dollar donation with the promise of keeping their memory alive forever (as storage costs go down and there's a time-value of money, this IS a profitable approach).

Monetization options to cover costs (I'm guessing this is a not-for-profit given your mindset) include per post for individuals or adverts via local search or google adsense. I prefer to keep ads out of this one- selling space may cheapen their memory in some peoples' eyes.

The GPS would be a cool feature, but requesting mappable coordinates could be a conceptual hurdle for many. Don't know about that one. I like the overall concept very much though.

Not an obituary person myself (are there many out there?) but this could be done from a technical perspective:

~ Write a program that scrapes the obituary web pages from the top 50 newspapers.
~ Write code that searches each entry for any addresses and post a link to Google Maps for those addresses.

I say: build it, don't put any Google ads up or anything (keep it non-commercial), promote it. If it becomes THE go-to site for obituaries, begin charging newspapers a license fee to have their content listed on your site. If they refuse, remove their entries from the site.

so would this be retro active? meaning going back as far as psoble?

"The only major business/ logistic hurdle is that you'll need a fact-checking"

And copyright law... What's in it for the newspapers? They are getting agressive about extracting cash for digital copies of thier work and would want to be paid for this content if this project became a sucess.

This particular idea lends itself to being made into a mashup. Definitely workable. Could garner income from advertising services around deceased. Could be the start of a huge website for those that want to keep up on death. Info could be pulled from online newspaper columns across the US or Canada...depending upon the country you wanted to follow. I'll look forward to seeing this idea taking off.

It seems a monumental task (pardon the pun) and I just don't see the commercial value. You said you've been in contact with a number of nationals (I'm not sure quite what that means.) who agreed in principal to syndicate their content. There's a big difference between agreeing in principal and actually doing it. From a technical standpoint it's doable. From a practical standpoint it's a different story.

My two cents of opinion:
I dont see any business model in your proposal. Its hard to invest ANYTHING from the past specially for the dead ones. For one it deal some pains and other odd memories that could refresh. Two, even if some would try (a small fraction i believe), no return service will be needed to give the business operation viable given that the market is "huge". Personally i would rather invent and or thnk of an idea that will make the living in better footing than possible expenses for my relatives sans the annual visitation and fervent prayers for them.

I like the idea, but this would definitely be a not-for-profit.

It could basically be a wikipedia of biographies pulled from obituaries, helping everyone to become a little more eternal.

So basically it would be the Cisan or Infomart that focussed solely on obituaries?
I use infomart and Cisan on a daily basis at work and they have huge subscriber fees and newspapers pay for the privilege of being a part of their search databases. This would be a good model for you to follow.
I did double check and I can already search any obituary from any newspaper within Infomart's library, however that is only Canadian papers within a certain ownership group.