I told a little story about Heath's iPod. Whenever we went into the trailer we'd say "Whose iPod is this?" Because it would always be some wacked-out music nobody had ever heard of before. And it was Heath's. And that iPod has since become a symbol of Heath and his friends pass it around to each other, download the music and then pass it on.

Eckhart has obviously strayed from the Hollywood line on copyright— downloading music from someone else's iPod is clearly infringement. But a blithe diffidence to piracy isn't the only way Eckhart's form of mourning shows how the mass culture has been infected by Silicon Valley.

A number of cases where bereavement meets technology have arisen over the last few years, such as the father of a American soldier who died in Iraq but couldn't get into his son's email account because Yahoo refused to allow access, or the numerous tributes left for the dead on their social network profile pages.

Ledger was only 28 when he died, on the cusp of the generation often called "Millennials." If he was anything like his peers, he must have defined himself in part by his taste in music. It's only natural that friends would go through his music collection as a way of getting a sense of the man they lost, with a song they enjoyed together providing a poignant point of shared experience.

But for those who already carefully craft their playlists the way my generation once obsessed over mixtapes, it puts a whole other layer of meaning onto your selections. I can see asking myself before synching with iTunes, "Will my friends appreciate the irony of including Journey's Greatest Hits if I get run over by a bus and all that's left of me is this iPod?"

Eckhart's recollection of Ledger suggests we can be known by our silicon — that we don't go to heaven as much as upload our digitized lives to the clouds. It is a view of our mortality that the programmers of Silicon Valley would be entirely comfortable with: Ashes to ashes, bits to bits.

Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure they've been lovingly crafting it for years — is that rare article worth reading beyond the first 100 words. You think Perez Hilton's nuts? Read up on Felker's career.

Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government and the high jinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sources and journalistic techniques.

Tonight the Geek Squad is going to hold a moment of silence at 8:01 pm to remember the venerable Arthur C. Clarke (in army time, that's 20:01). Memo's regarding Mr. Clarke's passing have been posted at Geek Squad precincts around the nation...See below for the memo the Agents created...best...CK

ARTHUR C. CLARKE
1917 - 2008

Yesterday, the worlds of science and science fiction lost one of their true visionaries, the inestimable Arthur C. Clarke, author of seminal works like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama. Through the writings of Mr. Clarke, all these worlds are yours.

It isn't easy to overstate Mr. Clarke's contribution to increasing the public's fascination with science and technology. In fact, Mr. Clarke's imaginative fiction, profoundly insightful futurist thinking and boundless optimism played no small part in shaping the formation of our company, Geek Squad.

Out of the deepest respect for Mr. Clarke, Geek Squad personnel will be observing a moment of silence this evening at 20:01 military time. Many thanks for your understanding. The sky is filled with one more star tonight.

Chris Kooluris
Ketchum
1285 Avenue of the Americas, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10019

To Our Fellow Members,

We have a tentative deal. "When they get paid, we get paid."

Best,

Patric M. Verrone

President, WGAW

Michael Winship

President, WGAE

Arrington is being far too generous in that murder scenario, I believe. He gives the executives at Time Inc. more credit for strategic thinking than they deserve. With the damage done, however, they faced a pragmatic choice of spending money to revive Business 2.0's ad sales, or reinvesting in Fortune, which now faces serious competition from Conde Nast's Portfolio. Can you blame them for making what was, to them, the safer bet?

New York-based media has never understood the Valley well, parachuting reporters in during the boom times, and abandoning it during the inevitable bust. (How long do you think Fortune's newly expanded San Francisco bureau, swollen with Business 2.0 refugees, will last during the next downturn?) That Time Inc. didn't know what to make of Business 2.0 isn't surprising. It's typical.

Whether or not Calacanis's social news site dubbed "Netscape" remains — our sources say, "Yes!" — is immaterial. It is an also-ran. Everything under the "Netscape" name is a just a rebranded testbed for AOL's weaker Web offerings. Despite the warm assurances of current "Netscape" leader Tom Drapeau, AOL's attempt to revive a Netscape portal a year after doing away with it reveals either significant problems with the social-news strategy or continued management dithering.

"Netscape" may continue as a poor man's Digg, a poorer imitation of AOL's poor imitation of Yahoo, or some grotesque combination of the two. But whatever it is, let's face it: It's increasingly irrelevant. Has the Facebook generation, after all, even used a browser called "Netscape"? Use AOL Labs as the sandbox for new technology, redirect Netscape's remaining traffic to AOL.com, and let the brand — beloved browser maker, implacable foe of Microsoft, and fiery dragon of Web 1.0 — rest in piece.