The future of blogging rests in Choire Sicha and Alex Balk's laptops. After defecting from the Gawker Empire for Radar, which closed, they opened up their own shop: The Awl, which arrived in (thrust itself into?) a new era, today.

In an email sent out to their daily email subscribers, two-time Gawker editor Choire Sicha revealed a backdated post that wouldn't appear on the front page of the site to otherwise uninitiated readers.

So this is a special Weekend Edition Email to thank you for your patronage. Why? Well, this week, on July 30, 2009, a person residing in (or visiting!) the glorious town of Austin, Texas clicked through from somewhere (perhaps from one of your Twitter accounts, dear reader!) to view a post (and then depart for Internet places unknown) and, in doing so, became our millionth visitor:

http://www.theawl.com/2009/07/one-mi…

(That's a backdated secret post, so that it didn't appear on our front page.)

This lucky Windows user, wrapping up the end of his or her workday at 5:30 p.m. local time, or perhaps just waking up, and getting ready for the roller derby, or maybe, well, who knows: who is shim? What time does hermself wake up? We may never know....

Now, Sitemeter is notoriously wacky as a traffic counter, as you probably know, so, don't worry, we don't attach too much significance to this number. But it's a big round number! How exciting! It kinda makes me feel like Ray Kroc.

The Awl launched to much excitement a few months ago: an interview with Vanity Fair's site, and posts from MediaBistro, like this one, in which Choire talks about how he doesn't look at his own traffic!

Has the press' lovefest led to strong traffic?

Sicha, for one, has no idea. "You know, I have actually *never looked* at our traffic," he emailed FishbowlNY.com this morning. "I leave that in David Cho's capable hands; he's our business guy, and that stuff is his problem. I am just trying to have a good time, and that itself is our stated goal."

Balk, Sicha, and their numerous contributors - who count plenty of Gawker Media past and present writers as among their numbers - look to be enjoying themselves, as they recently called this company the "Goldman Sachs of the Internet," (which is funny, because I'm still broke) and reportedly had their site crash due to an overwhelming influx of traffic. In the aforementioned email, they also announced a special new contributor who's "much better" than Ed Koch.

Meanwhile, this blog took note of nearly anti-celebrity-beat site The Awl's Michael Jackson-911-call link in a passive swipe, and before that, Nick Denton once took note of their content layout.

The Awl's now at a million hits and Denton's busy minting his own currency or something, and unlike Sicha, doesn't own any pets. Yet. "Congratulations" to all parties involved.

One Million Served [The Awl]