Downer of the day: MyDeathSpace.com

Some call the pages moving tributes, others exploitative trash. Either way you look at it, the folks at mydeathspace.com have a strange job: searching out and posting both the obituaries and the MySpace pages of dead people. The site has enjoyed a measure of both success and notoriety, garnering around 100,000 hits per day. (Despite this, you can understand why MySpace itself doesn't aggregate and post this kind of information: not only could it be construed as tasteless, but what use are dead folk on a social networking site, anyway? If you can't "friend" them, spam them or sell them things, it rather defeats the purpose.)

Some of the profiles have been taken over and altered by friends or family; others remain much as they were -- ripe for the macabre investigations of armchair psychologists -- and invariably the "comments" sections are full to brimming with testimonials, eulogies and plain ol' shout-outs from those who knew the deceased (and sometimes those who didn't). But take it from us -- this is one website you don't want linking to your page!