It doesn't matter if you're black or white. Or gay or straight. What matters is that you're single, and the happy couples of the Weddings and Celebrations section of the Sunday NYT aren't. Professional P.Y.T. Phyllis Nefler's on the case:

Sometimes I hate it when the Times goes slumming. It's like the Vows editors have set up a Microsoft Outlook alert that periodically reminds them to interrupt the typical rotation – your renegade dating columnists-turned-wifeys, your power lesbians, your affable foreign dignitaries – for a solemn celebration of How The Other Half Lives.

But I'm also an enormous sap. There used to be this commercial with a girl whose mother takes her to McDonalds as a reward for finishing a book by herself for the first time, and then the guy behind the counter hands her a menu in Braille, and I mean, I can't even describe the spot without significant emotional turmoil. So as you might imagine, this tale of a homeless ex-con marrying a drug-addicted single mom at the behest of her cherubic 5-year-old was quite the tearjerker at the Nefler household:

I could actually just boil the whole thing down to its first and last sentences ("Paul Sousa never imagined he would marry downriver from where he camped out many nights as a homeless child growing up with an alcoholic mother. … It was the first wedding he had ever attended.") and you'd see what I mean, but then you'd miss this:

Yet the couple couldn't get too serious. Twelve-step programs always counsel participants to avoid big decisions in the first year of sobriety. Still, she stayed sober and "the red flags were turning into pink hearts," he said, laughing. But one day, Alannah, now 5, told Mr. Sousa, "Paul, I want you to be my stepdad."

He teased her: "What do I have to do? An application? Interview process?"

She looked at him and said confidently, "You have to marry my mom."

It's genuinely touching, and it makes many of the other announcements seem enormously snobby and superficial in comparison. Luckily, snobbish superficiality is exactly what we're here for. Win-win! Onward.

I'm convinced Woody Allen wrote the script for the marriage of Rebecca Rosenberg and Justin Soffer, who met "at a benefit party at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan." They both have jobs that don't really exist in real life (the bride is a "freelance writer and video producer of marketing and promotional materials" and the groom is "a vice president of subscriber marketing at Travelzoo.com") and there's even a generation gap, which was exposed in the wake of a Charles in Charge reference gone bust. The first time they met, they decided to go in on raffle tickets together. Do I need to tell you if they won?

True confessions: I have a soft spot for the surprisingly many geologists and scientists that the Times trots out each week, so I should note that while Naomi Levin and Benjamin Passey both "rock" – thank you – they are no match for Jordan Garner and Dominic Colosi.

These 23-year old recent Yale graduates could not bear to leave New Haven (which, by the way, is a city on the move!); both took jobs at the university, she as a "collections assistant in the vertebrate zoology division of the Peabody Museum of Natural History" and he as a "research assistant on mass spectrometry at the university's Earth Systems Center for Stable Isotopic Studies." Man, how come all of my friends are just dumb old analysts?

Speaking of friends, in the interest of full disclosure I should note that I know this bride, and she is wonderful and lovely. And she also knows how to pick em: "the bridegroom is a maternal great-great-grandson of Levi P. Morton, the vice president under Benjamin Harrison, and governor of New York from 1895 to 1897. The bridegroom is also a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of the colony of New Netherland."

Elsewhere this weekend, Amanda Congdon – remember her? - married the director and editor of her vlog (her celebrated rack is not visible in the photo, unfortunately); Dick Cheney's former social secretary, who must have had a pretty light work load, married a National Security Council staffer; someone's dad literally wrote the book on Economics; the grandaughter of the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Pakistan, and Iran kept it international and married an Australian; and once again a well-executed neg (this one in the Bahamas) led to lasting bliss, proving that Mystery really is a modern genius.

In this weeks faceoff, we explore which of two blonde Sewanee graduates has entered into a union that is worth more to society:

Jennifer Sonfield and John Wolf

The bride works for Ralph Lauren and looks like she works for Ralph Lauren: +3
The groom graduated from Stanford: +2
The groom's father "is the founder and a managing partner of European Property Partners, an investment firm that focuses on the French real estate market": +2
The bride's parents own a furniture store: -1
It's in Hilton Head: +1
The groom is a principal at his real estate firm: +2

TOTAL: 9

Claire Nicoll and Edwin Lescop

Bride is at the ideal marriage age (25): +2
Bride graduated summa cum laude and received a masters in elementary education from Columbia: +6
The groom is studying for his MBA: +2
It's not at an Ivy League school: -1
The couple got married at the church where the brides father is a priest: +2. Man, that's really taking the Scary Father in Law concept to the next level, no?

TOTAL: 11

Our key takeaway? Blond Sewanee graduates are pretty boring. Especially when compared to the drug addicts, who, by the way, are expecting their first child together. Now if you'll excuse me, it's getting a little dusty in here.

[Ed. This is a good shot of Congdon's rack. Enjoy.]

D.C. videoblogger Andy Carvin rendered himself unfit for the camera.

Chicago Tribune reporter Wailin Wong discovered that magical Susan Boyle singing clip.

Formerly relevant Web-video personality Amanda Congdon made progress in her quest to become a crazy cat lady.

Wired.com's Priya Ganapati hit up a Twitter user as a source. And another. And another.

TechCrunch contributor Sarah Lacy displayed the toxic aftereffects of exposure to Julia Allison.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who believes Europeans are too lazy to found startups, experienced drooling contempt at the DLD conference in Munich.

Vaguely employed videoblogger Amanda Congdon concluded that L.A. is full of racists.

Macworld editor Kelly Turner froze in San Francisco.

BusinessWeek's Amy Feldman thought about the children.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis criticized the media.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Formerly famous podcaster Amanda Congdon kept it classy for another one of her forgettable post-Rocketboom projects.

Wall Street Journal gadget columnist Walt Mossberg got so distraught over Steve Jobs's health problems he couldn't type straight.

And like Jobs, Guardian writer Jemima Kiss overshared her digestive problems.

Blogueuse Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette, maintained her standards.

Vaguely employed gossipmonger Bonnie Fuller tried to make "cutes" a word.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

He's a leading Dallas attorney who even sued the firm he cofounded, Baron & Budd, and is a regular on blog Overlawyered. More interesting is that Amanda Congdon intervened in order to protect her claim on part of the company. Meanwhile, the younger Baron complains all this legal wrangling tied his dealmaking hands, and that the company nearly went broke twice this year.

The Rocketboom episode neatly explains why the world of online video so resembles film school, a parent-funded enterprise of self-indulgent auteurs with macroambitions viewed by microaudiences (including yours truly). Sony's deal doesn't affirm the potential of online video as a means of creative expression; it simply tells us that the rich, despite themselves, can't help getting richer. (Photos by Eric Skiff and Alex de Carvalho)

In a wonderful piece of linkbait, Vanity Fair produced an illustration featuring a number of popular "blogs" arranged in a cartesian graph from "Scurrolous" to "Earnest" on one axis and "Opinion" to "News" on another. While we're trying to grasp how the 'Wag ended up on the earnest side of the scale, more confusing is the inclusion of Salon and Slate. Apparently, if you're not printed on paper, you're a "blog" — even though both publications predate the term. But where the chart really gets things wrong is in using the disembodied head of Amanda Congdon to illustrate online video program Rocketboom. If the authors or illustrator actually watched the show or read many of the listed blogs, they'd know that Joanne Colan took over as host after a very nasty and public departure from the show by Congdon. Keep trying, guys, you're bound to figure out this Internet thing eventually!

No news yet on whether Baron will try to hire a third host for his show, which would mean the show had as many hosts as it's had paying advertisers.

"She was really one of the first, if not the very first, Internet blog stars," said Dan Goodman, the president of digital media for Media Rights Capital. "She has been entertaining people in the digital space since there were people to entertain there."

Ah yes, who can forget late 2004: the dawn of blogging. Or maybe just the first time ladies blogged. Blogged in a way that allowed users to see how pretty they were. It was a revolution! So we're sure Congond's new venture, "Sometimes Daily," will be a staggering success. Because it's not at all like there's been a glut of unwatched web video projects since she left the game in 2006 or anything!

The lesson here, of course: internet fame is not transferable to other media. Until Julia Allison's tv show launches.

After Forays With ABC and HBO, a Video Blogger Returns to Video Blogging [NYT]

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.

In his post, Baron gripes about Calacanis's "aggressive marketing tactics" to promote Mahalo Daily, the site's videoblog with former CNET host Veronica Belmont. But in a reply to Baron's attacks, Calacanis guesses the antipathy stems from Calacanis's public attempt to hire Amanda Cogdon after she quit Rocketboom.

Yeah, it could be that. Or it could be that in Mahalo Daily's launch trailer, Calacanis and Belmont parodied "Rocketboom" on Mahalo Daily and Calacanis said, "Hm. Been thinking about it. Rocketboom just isn't that funny."

There's only one way to resolve this, of course. No, not a catfight between Belmont and Rocketboom anchor Joanne Colan, pervs. Instead: Bulldog love!

That's the thing about "personal branding": it might just be a new version of what used to be called "having a distinct voice." The problem comes when people (not Doree, by the way) who don't yet have distinct voices, or maybe never will have them, are forced or force themselves to develop some kind of bloggy webby "platform."

"On Oct. 13, Columbia Journalism School held a day-long workshop called 'Building A Personal Website and Your Online Brand'; the attendees were all 'working journalists.'" Doree wrote. Also, "Today, even Times reporters who are hardly household names are encouraged to set up pages on nytimes.com with a list of their Web site 'picks,' so we can get to know them better."

And per Doree, the epitome of this trend is the woman Vanessa Grigoriadis described as "the most famous young journalist in New York" in New York magazine last week. That would be Julia Allison. Julia is quoted as saying, "I looked around, and I saw that the people who were getting assignments and getting paid really nicely for it were names. They were brands ...Ultimately, you're replaceable if you're not a brand."

So it's not just that "voice" is branding. Some folks really are incredibly brand-conscious.

But while the old conventional wisdom was that this kind of behavior was "blatantly ambitious" and therefore distasteful, "Today, being 'blatantly ambitious' has different overtones; we live in an era in which we've convinced ourselves that nearly any behavior is okay, as long as we're up front about it."

Maybe we're not just talking about the rules of journalism here, but the new rules of being any kind of public person with any kind of internet presence. Where's that line between person and persona, between honesty and intentional self-branding?

Rocketboom Video Blogger Not Renewed by ABC News; HBO Project Never Surfaces [B&C]

There's the fact that it's an old joke. That it's mostly humorous because Congdon is usually incapable of humor. That I laughed because she is defying her image as a vacuous, uninteresting shill attempting to make her way in the world of "legitimate journalism." That lightning doesn't strike twice. On second thought, who knows what the future will hold for Amanda Congdon? All I know is that if it looks anything like this, I'm wishing the videoblogger all the luck in the world.