Our Wedding, in a Wall Street Journal Article on "Liveblogging”

Wall Street Journal logo and photo from our wedding.

Our wedding gets mentioned in an article in today's Wall Street Journal Online titled The Minutes of Our Lives, which looks at the growing phenomenon of liveblogging -- that is, blogging about an event while at that event. It's no longer unusual to see people liveblogging at tech conferences or events on live television, but some people are liveblogging things like their Thanksgiving dinner or the birth of their child. Twitter.com, where you can post ultra-short entries typically no longer than a sentence, even had a post made from a mobile phone at a funeral.

Jennifer Saranow, WSJ staff reporter and author of the article, has been in touch with me and the Ginger Ninja for the past couple of weeks. She contacted us after finding this article on our wedding blog by Wendy:

If you would like to blog our wedding, you may do so! But after the fact. We really want all the fun things to be a surprise. And we really, really don't want you to bring your laptops to the wedding (JKB). We want you to pay undivided attention (Ethan, hee) to the ceremony and then have face-to-face exciting interactions - like dancing! (Erica, I know you don't need to be asked twice) - during the reception. But after you leave, we'd be more than happy to have you blog about it. There are a lot of bloggers and readers whom we weren't able to invite, and the more of a taste we as a group can offer them...well, it'd make me happy. We hope to post some photos soon after ourselves.

Here's the snippet from the Wall Street Journal article that mentions us:

Hosts who want to ensure that guests focus on the festivities are responding with countermeasures. Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted "A Note To Other Bloggers" on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact. "I wanted them to pay attention and enjoy themselves and participate," says Ms. Koslow, who came up with the idea for the embargo. "I wanted them to be in the moment."

Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony. From his hotel room, he wrote, "the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway." Rev. Adam says, "It was the thing that happened that day, so I wrote about it."

My thanks to Jennifer Saranow for including me and Wendy in the article!

As for the etiquette of Liveblogging, what do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments.

One Year Ago Today

Wendy and Joey's wedding
Photo courtesty of Ethan Zuckerman. Here's the original!

Happy 11th Month-a-versary, Wendy!

Eleven months of marriage already? Happy month-a-versary, Wendy!

I'll probably somewhere over the Atlantic when you first read this. I'll be back in time for month-a-versary dinner!

In the meantime, here's a scene that may or may not have occurred when we were dating...

Cover of 'Girls Romances' comic.

(This has been posted automatically in my absence. Ain't technology grand?)

Happy 10th Month-a-versary, Wendy!

It's been ten months to the day since I married Wendy, which means that it's time for me to post another sappy photo and take her out to dinner tonight. Happy tenth month-a-versary, sweetie!

Photo of two tabby cats nuzzling.

Happy 9th Month-a-versary, Wendy!

It's been nine months since I said "I do" to my lovely wife and every day has been as wonderful as it's been for the cats shown below:

Happy 9th month-a-versary, Wendy!

Happy 8th Month-a-versary, Wendy!

Can you believe it's been eight months since we've been married? This calls for a celebration! In the words of Homer Simpson:

"Marge, we're goin' for drive-through and we're doin' it twice!"*

* Do not interpret this exactly or literally. This ain't Jennicam, you know.

It's Not a Flamewar! It's an Exchange of Blog Entries That Do 3d6 Fire Damage!

(I couldn't resist making a Dungeons and Dragons joke in the title.)

We haven't sparred in quite some time, so her response to my response to her "Food Allergies are a Character Flaw" post feels like old times. Welcome back to the Monkey Knife Fight, Kathy!

(She needed a distraction from The Da Vinci Code, anyway.)

I'm not the only one to comment on Kathy's entry: there's also a response over at A Crafty Madness titled When waging war against assholes, it’s important not to become an asshole. It opens with:

Excuse my blunt language, but I am seeing a disturbing, though perhaps inevitable, trend filtering into the blogosphere (insert the usual god-I-hate-that-word disclaimer). It is this: in the various scrims brought about by the “clash of ideas” over current events, people are taking the opportunity to let their jerk flag fly.

Alas, this exchange probably isn't enough to land me the cover story of Internet Tough Guy Magazine...