Flutterby™! : Web death?

Steve is happily bouncing through the middle-east, and since he's stopped updating his web site I take a deep breath every time I see email from him. The author of inexplicably fancy trash has been absent since early October, and it's got me wondering about at what point we should declare the missing dead and hold a wake. And when all we know of someone is a pseudonym and a few of their writings, what does their absence mean? What's the difference between death and disappearing?

Now I really must get to work.