The 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, is expected to be marked with a special memorial service, television documentaries and floral tributes from the public.

Mourners not wanting to trek to the gates of Kensington Palace with flowers, however, can log on to a commemoration site – Respectance.com – where they can share their memories of the “people’s princess”.

“We were born the same year, we got married for the first time . . . Yes, the same year, and I cried all day the day you died,” writes Gill – one of dozens sharing poems, personal memories and conspiracy theories about Diana.

There are pages too for Elvis, Kurt Cobain and Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old shot dead in Liverpool, north-west England, last week. Nearly 900 people have left messages on Rhys’s page registering shock, grief and sympathy for the family.

There are more than 400 tribute pages for individuals – young people lost to cancer, soldiers killed in Afghanistan, octogenarian grandparents. There is even a tribute to a dog.

Tribute internet sites for friends, relatives and public figures are a growing trend on the internet. A quick Google search for Diana tributes brings up 649,000 pages, such as the site for the England’s Rose Fan Club. There are more than 20,000 videos about Diana on YouTube.

After the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, many students used social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to create pages where friends and relatives could post remembrances of the dead.

Richard Derks, the Dutch founder of Respectance.com, says people are turning to the internet as an outlet to express their grief. “When you have a bereavement, friends normally allow you to talk about it up to three weeks, but then they want you to move on. But you will not stop thinking about it. The internet is a place to share these memories.”

Mr Derks, formerly a co-founder of music-sharing service Kazaa, and his business partner Tom Wilkinson came up with the idea for Respectance four years ago when Mr Wilkinson was unable to return to his native Canada for his mother’s funeral. Phone calls to his family in that week revealed a number of stories about his mother – as a sister, a neighbour, a wife – and Mr Wilkinson began thinking of a way to pull these together in one place.

Mr Derks says while people can use sites such as MySpace and Facebook for remembering the dead, many may prefer a specialist site. “It is about appropriate places. If your grandmother passed away, you would lay her to rest in a graveyard, not the front garden. The same way, I might not want to put her tribute page on MySpace next to the profile of a kid doing skateboarding tricks.”

Respectance launched in July, with $1.5m (€1.1m, £748,000) in funding from Solid Ventures, a Dutch venture capital company, and Big Bang Ventures of Belgium.

It is free to join and set up a tribute, and the site carries no advertising. But Mr Derks plans to generate revenues from tie-ups with US funeral homes, which will sponsor advertorials on the site and offer Respectance tribute pages as one of their services to families.

Respectance is also considering offering paid-for services, such as downloading videos, sending flowers or handling charity donations.

Another site is Mydeathspace.com, a website set up by a 26-year-old clerk from California that provides obituaries of MySpace users. These tend to be young people who have died in car accidents, of drug overdoses or committed suicide, and the advertising-funded site is aimed at providing a warning to young people.

Meanwhile, Eons.com, a social networking site for over 50-year-olds, founded by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, offers online obituaries as one of its services to customers. A central database sends out an electronic obituary to all your Eons contacts after you go.

Mr Derks says the internet is changing our traditions of mourning. “Some traditionalists are opposed to our concept and say grief should be private, but others are saying it is good we finally have a way to deal with it in an open way. It is setting a new tradition. Two years from now it will be standard practice to have a tribute site.

“There is a saying in Mexico that you die three times,” says Mr Derks. “First you die spiritually, then when your body is gone, and the third time when no one remembers you any more. That is what we are trying to change – to hold on to the memory.”

Online, you don’t have to be Elvis or Diana for your memory to live forever.