blueprints
The First Years Out
Whether for fans, foes or no
one in particular, millions of
bloggers make their own news
Minus a few expletives, the Aug.
18, 2003, entry at xtcian.com
goes like this: “The blog, despite
my valiant efforts, seems to exude the idea
that I am a navel-gazing, latently misogynistic, whiny twit so lost in a prep-school,
money-induced fever that I have no idea
what a buffoon I look like. Don’t you
know that I know People on that message
board seem to think I have no idea that I
look like Philip Seymour Hoffman, or that
Tessa and I first met at a Public Ivy, or that
we’re both hopelessly white — I mean ...
do you think we possess ZERO self-aware-ness? I have half a mind to rename this
blog I Know What This All Must Look
Like To You But I’m Continuing To Write
Anyway.”
That cri de coeur — written after a
description of his wedding to Tessa Blake
’ 91 prompted some readers to comment
that his tux was ugly and his wife too
pretty for him — is classic Ian Williams
’ 90. The blog Williams started in 2002 is
no holds barred, sometimes excruciatingly
so. Its self-revelatory nature fits some people’s preconceptions about blogs, but
Williams’ often wildly entertaining style
has created a devoted community of readers. Despite — or maybe because of — the
intensely personal nature of his posts, his
blog gets a few thousand hits a day. When
he takes a break, readers write in and ask
where he is.
Williams began blogging after he struggled for months with the aftermath of
being in downtown Manhattan when the
planes hit on Sept. 11. “I had a hard time,
PTSD and therapy,” he says. “I started the
antidepressant Celexa, and I wanted a daily
log of how it was affecting my brain.” A
sample post from that time: “I am feeling
this drug barring and gently locking the
basement door to the worst parts of my
A Blog’s Life
depression. It just won’t let you go down
there, and better yet, it casually suggests, in
an offhand sort of way, that you stop thinking about it.”
After about two weeks, Williams says,
his blog “stopped being about Celexa and
started being about everything else.”
Everything else has included proposing to
and marrying Blake, the birth of their
daughter, Lucy, something he refers to as
“My Adventures with Speed” and much,
Writer Ian Williams ’ 90 has
documented his life on
Xtcian.com since 2002.
Readers followed the
excitement over the birth of
his daughter with wife Tessa
Blake ’ 91 and the NCAA
championship in 2005.
much more. A television and movie writer
who wrote a Daily Tar Heel column called
“Wednesday’s Child” as an undergraduate,
Williams says his blog keeps his writing
muscles in shape between paying projects.
At last count, about 57 million blogs
were out there, according to Technorati, a
search engine that tracks them. Bloggers
create about 100,000 new blogs — and
about 1. 3 million postings — every day.
And numerous Carolina alumni are blog-
