My first attempt at figuring out why The Awl is so good.

I am going to leave the breakdown of weighty subjects to other people, and hopefully I am biting off a small chunk of this pie, but I want to try my hand at figuring out why something is so good. I am going to start with blogs as a whole. I have become entranced by blogs in the last few years, they have seriously started to become important voices in their own right. They aren’t deriving their awesomeness from any other medium, they are bloggers through and through. At least the blogs that I love to read. The blog that has come to define blogging for me is The Awl. The Awl was created by Choire Sicha, and in there own words they were created to “encourage a daily discussion of the issues of the day—news, politics, culture (and TV!)—during sensible hours of the working week.” (source Yesterday I saw the title of a a post of there’s, it was titled “Hurley Killed Rosie Larsen”. When I clicked through I found this. First for context. This is a blog post playing on a recent TV show called The Killing. The Killing was really good a building suspense, just like another infamous TV show Lost, and just like Lost they built the entire season up, and then didn’t give satisfactory answers, I still think it’s a good TV show, and I think anyone else who likes TV would think it’s a good TV show as well. If we look at who The Awl is trying to serve you can see already they are hitting their core market TV enthusiasts. Which I am one of so already one big hash mark on the big board. The more subtle reason that this blog post is awesome, this very small blog post, is indicative of the medium that its written in. Blogs have this ability to cary on a relationship with the reader like nothing before. Maybe it’s a time and place kind of thing, but I think it’s different. Blog’s, good blog’s at least, are built on people, and tone. You the reader come to expect a certain ebb, and flow from a blog. Not only can you fall in love with tone, but blogs can last for years. Who knows now long blogs will last for, can you imagine seeing the tag line ‘worlds oldest blog’, but The Awl has been going on since 2009. Other blogs I read have been going on longer. So, on a multi-daily basis I am getting updates from a real person. There ideas a permeating my life. Finally, thing that makes my stomach turn, in a good way, like this in a life changing way, is that it made me laugh out loud, it literally made me LOL. I can’t imagine reading something in a newspaper like this blog post. It’s more like a friend who had a really good one liner, and he said it at a party. This the most amazing part, blogs are broadcast. Somehow blogs have figured out how to cross the broadcast/personal barrier. This wasn’t the first time I felt The Awl was just killing it, and I realize that the main reason that I think The Awl is so good is because I like the Awl, but that I think is the trick here. This one post only makes sense if you have a long-standing relationship with the blog. This personalization of broadcast mediums is what makes The Awl, and this one post so good.