I am seriously backlogged reading the hundred or so emails I receive a day (who has time to count them). I finally got to one of my favourite e-newsletters by Sean McGrath.
He writes an interesting article about what a fully online wedding might be like:ITworld.com - A Webby Wedding
This article resonated with me as a couple weeks ago my wife and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary. At the time we got married (Oct. 23 1999) I was just finishing up the Internet Management program ant Humber College. To hone my skills and as a online testament to our e-ternal love I built us a Wedsite.
On our anniversary we reviewed the wedsite which has been left lingering unloved in cyberspace for years. (We switched ISPs a couple years ago but our old one never removed my web files so the wedsite lives on - thankfully it hasn't outlived our marriage). Anyway, we still enjoyed the wedsite as it is such a reflection of us, which was what it was meant to be. It is silly and fun and I think unique. Yes the design makes me groan and there are some really dated elements, but overall there were some cool things, particularly for the time.
I had links to a couple webrings which were an early attempt to build communities and encourage traffic - kind of like a blogroll now. I had links to our online registry at the Bay (after all marriage is a gift grab!) where people could buy online and have it shipped to us automatically. I had multimedia in the form of RealAudio clips of our songs and an animated gif (okay sorry about that - animated gifs were okay in 1999 seriously!). We had games, trivia and surveys for our suggested new surname and TV couple we should emulate and voters could, and did write in their own content - so this was interactivity and user-generated content.
Okay I'm grasping - but for a wedsite at the time it was pretty rocking.
No comments:
Post a Comment