Season three of Battlestar Galactica is getting better as it continues, if you ask me. The current episode, Torn, is my favorite so far this season. I’ll be honest that I prefer Galactica when it’s out in space, though I appreciate the creativity and audacity of the New Caprica storyline. Here’s what stood out to me in Torn:

• Sometimes timing on Galactica is a bit too perfect. To think that the Cylons and the Colonials came upon the same nebula that points toward Earth near the same time is probably a stretch, but I still like where the episode headed. My larger grief with this kind of coincidence still lies with season two, when Starbuck conveniently returns to Kobol from Caprica during the same time that Colonials happen to be present to pick her up.
• I love the glimpses we’re seeing of the Basestar. They’re not showing it all at once, and they’re teasing us just enough to make us want to see more. Even though the sets have a sci-fi look to them, I still found a freshness in them that didn’t seem too cliched. The bridge, in particular, was intriguing. One question, though: Why does this Basestar seem to look so different from the one in Kobol’s Last Gleaming in season one? Are we seeing a different level aboard the ship?
• Bravo to Adama for calling out Starbuck and Tigh. They’ve been through a lot, but I guess I just don’t understand blaming your liberators for your pain. It was good to see Kara seek out redemption later in the episode. I love Michael Hogan’s portrayal of Tigh, and I hope his spiral continues only because Hogan makes it so ugly (in a good way).
• I’m very curious to see where Baltar is headed, literally and figuratively. He better not be a Cylon. That would spoil a lot of the appeal of his conflicted character for me. It would also make his semi-witting collaboration with Six in the miniseries less dramatic.

The World College Dictionary’s word of the year is crackberry, which describes addiction to Blackberry devices. This seems a little late to me because I remember hearing this phrase in 2003 or 2004 at the least, but I guess this means that crackberry has officially entered our societal consciousness (or at least that, on average, this word doesn’t have to be defined at least somewhat often when used in conversation because people know it already).

It’s interesting to me when a word transcends its original meaning over time. How often do you picture the fruit (above) before you picture the phone when you hear this in conversation? The first time I’ve thought of the real berry before the smartphone berry in a long time was this past weekend, and that was because I was in a winery that featured blackberry wine. (It wasn’t very good, if you ask me.)

Is there a word for Treo addiction, because that’s my particular strain of this ailment. Treoitis, perhaps?

Technorati released its latest “State of the Blogosphere” report this morning. What strikes me about the report is how much blogging is not happening. Look at these numbers:

• Technorati is tracking about 57 million blogs right now.
• Half (55 percent) are considered active, but “active” means they have been updated one time within the past three months. That does not seem active to me.
• That figure means that 25.6 million blogs are outdated and not being used. (I think that is a conservative estimate.)
• Technorati tracks 1.3 million blog posts per day. That seems to indicate that only a small fraction of the 57 million blogs update even once per week (at best it would be 9 million blogs).
• Of late, the number of blogs tracked doubles every 236 days.
• At least 100,000 blogs are created each day, more than one per second. Using the numbers above, that means that roughly 45,000 blogs are being created every day that will ultimately be abandoned and just sit dormant out there on the Web.

I want to examine this in a subsequent post in more detail, but this report supports a notion I’ve held for a long time: The Web is only an effective communication tool when you commit to consistently using it to communicate. If you don’t, you’re just filling (and wasting) space.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for alerting me to this report’s release. (This is a solid communications blog, if you are in the need for one.)