In The Awl‘s 142 tweets so far in October, the average word count, excluding URLs, is 7. The median is 6, meaning half of the tweets have 6 or more words; half, six or fewer. (@Mediaite‘s shortest was six words.)

Last week Chris Lehmann, Bookforum editor and Managing Editor of Yahoo’s News Blog, announced the launch of his new book, Rich People Things. The book was born out of his long-running column of the same name for The Awl. Nisha Chittal speaks to Lehmann about the book, the column, and the events that led him to write about so-called “Rich People Things”

The New York Times is reporting a gain in second quarter profits for its parent company, Times Co., over last year’s second quarter numbers. Though your initial reaction might be to jump and cheer for this apparent sign of recovery in the world of print media, The Awl suggests you instead take the report with a grain of salt.

The New York Times has published their other Gov. David Paterson ‘bombshell’ article today. So what does this one say. Well it’s not scandalous, but it’s not great. Paterson is remote, unreliable, and is “increasingly reliant on people whom he feels comfortable with but who lack deep experience in government” also he may not actually work that hard.

Well, I guess this is a fitting end to an absurd newscycle. The big New York Times ‘bombshell’ story about David Paterson isn’t actually about David Paterson. Ba dump! It’s about his aid David W. Johnson. Here’s the part the rumor mill did get right: it’s a big story.

It’s time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title “Best Blogs” from this annual list and change it to “Most Notable” blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year’s list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

This weekend, when the story of a police officer pulling out a gun at a snowball fight in DC erupted and spread online, the Washington Post was initially dismissive, despite having an eyewitness on the scene who said that the officer did indeed pull out a gun. They didn’t get the story quite right until days later. In a scathing blog post, the Washington City Paper surmised as to how the Post slipped up: a snooty attitude towards the Internet.

the Washington Post has opted to run another Sarah Palin op-ed piece, this one about Climategate. The piece is a re-working of something Palin posted on her Facebook page last week and the Post is apparently drawing the ire of some readers who feel it’s just a clear grab for traffic.

This morning, TechCrunch stumbled across a time capsule: a brand-new video promoting Friendster, touting its upgrade that, it appears, makes it function like the MySpace of eight years ago. They miss, though, the Secret Hidden Message™ of the video. That being: Asians only, please.

We’ve noted a few times in passing on this blog that it sometimes feels like the Gawker websites are determining how media will look online going forward. But today it looks like Gawker is taking one step closer to the mainstream, or at least how the mainstream used to look. Gawker head Nick Denton explains.

When The Awl asked “What Were Black People Talking About Last Night?“, which Mediaite’s Robert Quigley called “lazy and, well, casually racist,” one of the things that got lost was an actually interesting question – how do these seemingly random hashtagged trending topics get started?

So we found out.

The Awl, the oddly named progeny of Choire Sicha and Alex Balk (who are the oddly named progeny of Gawker), hit the targeted marketing jackpot with an innocent post detailing much sought-after knowledge: how to draw Asian women. Say what you will about Google Ads – they are right on point in this case.

For those of you not ‘in the know,’ The Awl is a blog run by former Gawkerers Choire Sicha and Alex Balk. Now, I read The Awl every day, and usually like it. But I was offended — unironically, actually offended — by an Awl post this morning titled “What Were Black People Talking About On Twitter Last Night?” At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by Tumblr: it was kind of racist.

Over at The Awl, Choire Sicha has been doing a crackerjack, data-intensive job of sifting through one of the biggest, least sexy stories of our time: newspapers as we know them are going away. Yesterday, he put together this acclaimed chart of the circulations of six big papers over the past two decades. Today, he covers newspapers’ coverage of their own decline:

TheAwl.com co-founder Choire Sicha ridiculeds the FCC’s new disclosure guidelines for bloggers…and demonstrates the benefits of good product placement. We’re not sure if this last line of Sicha’s piece was meant to be meta, but it’s certainly a fitting capper for the article. Which, by the way, is both smart and funny.

Was John McCain right when he said that Obama and Paris Hilton were basically the same person? No, but they do share a habit of looking alarmingly consistent across photographs.

Eric Spiegelman has sped up 130 photographs of Obama meeting with foreign dignitaries (video after the jump), and ‘Bam’s expression is virtually the same in all of them, to creepy effect. Remind you of any heiresses you know?

People of Wal-Mart is a sky blue, bare-bones blog that features strange-looking and/or poorly-dressed people in and around Wal-Mart across the country. In the lingo of the site, “Wal-Creatures.”

Unlike most out-of-nowhere web trends, People of Wal-Mart has touched a nerve and inspired a debate — but Time‘s profile of the site is as toothless as they come.

Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, then and now; Eggers on Katrina; something about the world’s strangest frogs and other fun things we’ve come across during our day reaping the fruits of the Internet!