A little less than a month ago, I dumped on Podcasting for being a vast wasteland of worthlessness. Like “middle school kids doing cafeteria announcements,” to be precise.

I’ve spent a lot of time since then listening to a variety of Podcasts, and I’m here to report that there’s at least one solid gold needle in the Podcasting haystack: Coverville, a three-times-a-week Podcast by Colorado resident Brian Ibbott that focuses on cover songs.

Brian’s been at it for about a year, and all his Coverville broadcasts are available on his site. Next to Vin Scelsa’s Idiot’s Delight, it’s about the best thing going for fans of eclectic (mostly rock) music.

In yesterday’s post, I talked about information overload. Check this out:

In the 25 seconds it takes you to read this post, 260 new blog entries have been posted to the Internet. That’s about 900,000 new blog posts every day, more than double the volume of postings in January 2005.

Wow.

The stats are culled from part 2 of Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere: August 2005.” Some terrific information there.

Call this one Vacation By The Numbers:

I have about a dozen email accounts, but use only three of them regularly for work. I get back from vacation last night, and I have: 403 emails in one account, 72 emails in the second account, and 267 in my third account, plus 1,144 new items in my RSS reader (yes, 1,144 — that’s not a typo).

My vacation was four days long. Four days. Two of those days were Saturday and Sunday. And these numbers are as of the morning of the fourth day.

Glub . . . glub . . . glub . . .

The other day, I blogged about a simple but effective use of Flash by JanSport. Here’s something far more complex, but no less effective: Into the Storm, an online “magazine” produced by BMW that has some of the best Flash work I’ve ever seen. It may take some time to load, particularly if you’re on dialup, but it’s well worth it.

The following is an email I received recently, presented unedited for your amusement:

Card Activation

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Issues of grammar, punctuation, and syntax aside, is there anyone who looks at that URL and thinks anything other than, “this is one of the most blitheringly blatant email scams I’ve ever seen!” I hope not. If there’s even one, then education about phishing still has a long way to go.