I recently returned from a festive break with my girlfriend’s family at their home in Gignese – a beautiful small Italian comune high up in the Piedmont region. One of the first things that we do after arriving is go for a walk around the surrounding area, which usually finishes at the local cemetery. Resting here are a number of generations of her ancestors, including most recently her nonno (grandfather).

One of the major differences between this cemetery and the ones found in the UK is that, where available, it’s customary to display a photo of the deceased next to their name on the headstone. In no way did I find this practice to be macabre. On the contrary, I believe the photo can only serve to humanise and build a better impression of the person. For older graves, the grainy image might even be a copy of the only photo of that person in existence.

This made me think. I’m going to shoot about 500 photos in glorious technicolor at an 8.1 megapixel resolution during the course of this trip, and all but the most blurry or unflattering are going to be uploaded to Flickr whilst we unpack our suitcase when back in London. It’s very likely that unless I remove these photos from my Flickr account, they will live on forever without a pixel of degeneration. The process is already being further refined since the latest mobiles enable you to shoot and upload photos to Facebook or TwitPic over the air in a single step.

Every piece of information shared across social media, whether it be videos, photos, posts, comments or tweets, is permanently locked in a digital time capsule across an international network of server farms run by organisations such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that should have the capacity to scale and maintain their services almost indefinitely. Unfortunately Twitter doesn’t fit into this category yet!

We’re also creating and sharing more personal information that ever before; and in some cases already enough to chart an individual’s day-to-day thoughts and experiences (even the annoying misspelt tweets that I attempt to delete but still appear in search!). One day my great-great-great-grandchildren might even decide to tune in to the YouTube of Christmas past whilst on vacation aboard a space hotel orbiting a distant planet. They may even read this post…

So all this leads on to a positive thought for 2009: connecting and sharing with others is good. Do more of it. Blog more, tweet more, post more; and be proud that what you share will probably live forever.