Birthdays are grim occasions, hellish reminders that life is passing you by and you are heading mercilessly towards death, but last week I embraced the morbidity and spent the entire morning of my 33rd birthday browsing memorial websites.

The idea was to work out whether sites such as the following were really as sick as they sound: friendsatrest.com (“a place to create a heartfelt memorial to your loved one”); muchloved.com (“the online memorial charity”); gonetoosoon.org (“a place to celebrate the lives of those we loved by creating an everlasting memorial for free”); www.lastingtribute.co.uk (“invites you to celebrate the lives of family, friends and people in the public eye who are no longer with us”); memory-of.com (“personalised, interactive pages created in the memory of lost loved ones”); www.tributetimes.co.uk (“our services provide a dignified way of sharing precious memories in a new age of digital communication”); and www.remembered-forever.org (“you can share memories, photos, videos and more, creating an everlasting online tribute to those who have passed away”).

Initially the conclusion appeared to be straightforward enough: yes, they are as sick as they sound. After all, some of these sites offer memorial space for celebrities and pets alongside family members, some of the comments on some sites are from “grief tourists” who didn’t even know the deceased, some of the more commercial sites try to flog you $80 (£49) “memory bears”, $170 “queen memory throws” or $28 custom pendants as you browse heartfelt tributes to the newly snuffed, and the way some of the more commercial sites market themselves is truly stomach-churning.

Here, for instance, we have Legacy.com (“where life stories live on”), bragging that through affiliations it “features obituaries and guest books for more than two thirds of people who die in the United States”. Meanwhile, a few days after the 9/11 attacks, www.perpetualwebsites.com was announcing that it was “donating memorial websites valued at over $3 million to the families of the victims of the terrorist attack on America”. In a press statement, the company added: “Nothing can take away the pain that is being felt by those directly affected by this tragedy. It is only hoped that the donation of these sites [which normally sell for $500 each] will help to ease that pain and help those affected to deal with the inevitable sadness and grief.” And, of course, to provide much-needed publicity for www.perpetualwebsites.com — a website which, I can’t help noticing, no longer appears to work. So much for eternity.

The most disturbing revelation — more disconcerting even than the discovery that there is a website in New Zealand where you can track, via GPS, the ashes of loved ones — was that legacy.com compiles annual rankings of its most popular deaths. Apparently, last year the late American actor and comedian Bernie Mac, who died in August 2008, ranked highest, “receiving more than 13,000 entries to his online guest book hosted by the site”, with Tim Russert, the journalist, lawyer and moderator of the NBC political talk show Meet the Press, taking second place, and the Hudson family — “the mother, brother and nephew of Oscar -winning actress and entertainer Jennifer Hudson” taking joint third. I don’t know what is more disturbing, the thought that one’s death could be commemorated with a Facebook-style page scrawled with inanities from people you barely knew, or for your popularity or lack of it to be ranked. Gross.

At least, it seemed gross until I spent some time browsing the “in remembrance” section of legacy.com, where there is a page for every member of the American Armed Forces who died in Iraq or Afghanistan, and noticed that relatives, friends, schoolmates, comrades and total strangers were leaving tribute messages months and, in some cases, years after death. Then it struck me that such websites might actually fill in a gap left by traditional funerals, cremations and memorials.

Indeed, before one starts criticising memorial websites, it is important to compare what they offer with what happens in conventional rituals: basically, within days of someone passing away, the bereaved gather at a religious institution that many have never attended before and that meant nothing to the deceased, to sit through a religious ceremony presided over by someone who possibly never knew the deceased, before shuffling on to a neutral venue to scoff a few sandwiches, possibly sign a condolence book, exchange platitudes with the fellow bereaved (who are all too shattered to take in any of it anyway), and that’s it.

The fact is that, for all their flaws, memorial websites provide a useful outlet for grief, which is not something that ends the moment someone is buried or cremated. They allow the bereaved to leave personal tributes in the form of various media, at a time of their choosing and repeatedly if necessary. You can visit these sites whenever you want, whereas graveyards and crematoria are often inaccessible and depressing. They are often religiously neutral, too — which, let’s face it, is quite useful in our agnostic world.

It is all very public, of course, but we do everything online now, it doesn’t have to be impersonal and cheap, and we should all be more open about death. And some of the advertisements are a bit crass, but people have always made money out of death and some of these sites provide useful opportunities for charities to raise cash, and useful links to help people during a time of need.

Yes, there are aspects of this interactivity that are disturbing and bewildering — one site, for instance, offers “customised e-mail alerts that automatically notify users of the deaths of former friends, colleagues and associates”, there is some evidence that celebrating death online can encourage youth suicide, and there have been instances of people being memorialised on these sites before they have actually died (in 2007 a woman in Scotland found out that she’d had her death faked on Gone Too Soon only when people began ringing with condolences). But, on balance, if I was run over by a bus on the Charing Cross Road tomorrow, I think I would rather my passing was marked on one of these websites than with a £2.99 bouquet from Tesco tied to a set of rusty railings.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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