Bizarrely, this FmH post from 2001 about Simon Kelly’s internet-assisted suicide has suddenly started to attract comments. Some viewers of a recent BBC television documentary on the issue were apparently prompted to search the web for references to Kelly and found my entry on the issues surrounding his death. (A search on “Simon Kelly and suicide” in Google does not point to FmH, but some search engine must.) They have started a chat about the issues in my comments section. I don’t think I had comments enabled in July, 2001, but my subsequent changes to the FmH template have migrated back to the archived pages, so the ‘chatroom’ was there waiting to happen.

Here is more recent Wired coverage of the issue, here is an August, 2001 Network Computing column on his death, and here is a letter to Network Computing from Simon Kelly’s mother (scroll about halfway down the page), which I found via the aforementioned Google search.

I was only alerted to this happening because I get emails of every comment entered on FmH, and I was puzzled by the context of these comments until I dug up the post to which they referred. I’m curious about whether this happens with any regularity — it might not be so infrequent an occurrence that websearches on a resurrected topic point to old weblog posts and inspire comments long after the fact. I may have missed the email notification of the odd commment here and there if a conversation on a topic did not develop, and despite my curiosity I do not have the patience to go back through all the archived pages to see if any comments have been entered recently on old posts (even though it would be a little easier to spot with FmH than it would on some other weblogs since, as I mentioned, I did not have comments enabled back then). It is possible that new, unnoticed comments are being entered on old posts all over the weblog universe. In some fundamental way, people doing so do not understand the impermanent nature of a weblog, where contents go ‘off the scroll’ and into the bit bucket and it is only by chance that they will be noticed. Fascinating sidelight to history…