Immortality through virtualization. Life Online After Death:

For now, in these first weeks after Zach's death, it's been comforting to still "have Zach around." Instead of an awkward new ritual of leaving flowers at his graveside, I can leave messages for him the way I always have. There will always be things that only Zach would understand, and it's nice to know that there's still a place I can share them.

Extended interaction with the representation of a person, while naturally less then direct interaction with the actual person, has the benefit of forcing one to create a stronger internal concept of that person, and that concept can persist long after the person is gone, especially if you can continue to interact with the representation of that person in more or less the same way as you had before.

Kinda makes you want to go dump your computer in the river, doesn't it?