The underwhelming public response to the memorial service for Diana, Princess of Wales, a few weeks ago ought to tell us something about the whole business of memorial services. In the future, expect an even sparser, more forlorn gathering of mourners.

This doesn’t mean we are uncaring, insensitive oafs who will mark such anniversaries by ceremoniously ignoring them. Well, not all of us. Instead, we’ll probably be ditching work to create web tributes: Facebook groups, MySpace pages, blogs and YouTube mash-ups.

This is not good news for the media, particularly TV news outlets, which love a crowd. Training a video camera on web tributes may not make for good TV, but it does produce a more comprehensive display of our feelings, our insights, our creative side. This vast network of pipes called the internet has become a refreshingly human forum for grappling with life and death, explaining why hundreds of thousands of people have taken the time to build online tributes to the late Princess, dwarfing the few hundred mourners who gathered in London and Paris last month.

Two tech entrepreneurs, Todd Wilkinson and Richard Derks, have been aware of this phenomenon for some time. In July, they launched Respectance, a social network for dead people.

Users can log on to Respectance to post memories, photos and videos of their friends and relatives, their heroes and princesses who have passed away. Some of the tributes are puzzling. There are already 26 tributes to Fidel Castro, who I’m pretty sure is not officially dead. Anna Nicole Smith collects 11; Elvis scores 81 and “Croc hunter” Steve Irwin, 59. Diana, not surprisingly, tops them all with 147.

The celebrity tributes overflow with raw feelings. You can almost picture one user, Patti Borden, as she presses Caps Lock and types her epithet: "SHE WILL ALWAYS BE THE BEST ENGLAND HAD TO OFFER - NO ONE COMES CLOSE TO HER - HER BOYS WILL SEE TO THAT.”

I’ve always been a bit baffled by the immense outpouring of emotion ten years ago. After reading through dozens more web tributes I cannot say I am any closer to understanding it. But other tributes on Respectance, for people I’ve never heard of, I find truly touching. One woman, still bursting with grief, writes that she misses her baby sister so much. Now, I want to know more about her sister, and this woman too who is sharing all this with us.

Derks said he and Wilkinson really had no idea what to expect when they launched the service. They focussed on the American market because, they thought, Americans, as a group, are more inclined to go online and share with complete strangers their feelings about death and dying than most other nationalities. But half the users to the site are non-Americans, Derks said.

Some of this was to be expected. “For example, Latin Americans have picked up the concept easily. This makes sense. In this culture, deceased grandmothers are still there. They are still considered part of the family,” Derks said. Other tributes were never anticipated. A number of Norwegian mothers posted tributes for their still-born children.

And then there is the growing number of self-tributes on Respectance, Derks sheepishly points out. Some are written by users with terminal conditions. But with others, it’s pretty clear, these people are going to be around for a while, no doubt checking to see if friends and loved ones bother to leave a few kind words while they’re still here. What’s the etiquette here? Is it impolite to leave your friend’s tribute page blank when he’s gone to all this trouble of writing himself an obituary?

Derks, who is a big fan of the brilliant HBO series Six Feet Under about a family of funeral home directors, welcomes such an outpouring of emotion about a subject as taboo as death, even if it is written by a living person for a living person.

“It is not so much about dying or death,” Derks says of the importance of the tributes. “It’s about the memories. We all want to be remembered. In many ways, not being remembered is more frightening than death”.

A comforting thought indeed for Fidel Castro.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com