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"With 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, 200 million tweets being posted every day and the average Facebook user creating 90 pieces of content each month, this generation is publishing an unprecedented amount of data that will live in the cloud indefinitely \u2014 even after we\u2019re gone.  \nBack in July at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland (which I also covered for Mashable), I gave a 5-minute talk about the implications that the social media boom will have on the future of mortality, and what might become possible as technology\u2019s ability to understand and process the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content we\u2019re creating in our lifetimes continues to grow exponentially.  \nIn my talk, I discussed a number of services that are already emerging for figuring out what happens to our online identity and social media accounts after we die, as well as a couple of examples of how people are already planning their digital legacy.  Ultimately, I hypothesize that technology will one day be able to recreate a realistic representation of us as a result of the plethora of content we\u2019re creating converging with other advances in machine learning, robotics and large-scale data mining.\nAt the very least, the 1 billion or so people currently making use of social media will leave behind a legacy unlike anything created by any previous generation.  At the most, we\u2019ll soon have a number of philosophical questions to deal with about the nature of our existence and what comes after it.\nCheck out my talk in the video below and let me know what you think in the comments.  \n\n\n         \n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/08/01/adam-ostrow-ted-talk/>