I know, I know—the blog has been content-light for several weeks. But now that several hundred thousand copies of The World Almanac 2008 are being bound and shipped out to retailers across the country, your trusty editors can finally turn their attention to... well, to thinking about the 2009 edition, but also to keeping up with our daily blog-posting schedule again.

In case you missed any of it the first time around, here's a recap of some of the new facts and links we managed to squeeze out over the past couple of months, in the midst of our book-producing insanity. Stay tuned for more (and also for a redesign of the blog and the main World Almanac website, due later this week:

Map Mashups: Yahoo's funky new map tool continues to grow; check out the nifty overlay at right, showing a map of the Forum overlaid on a modern-day map of Rome.

Wikiscandal: Virgil Griffith's online tool for tracing the IP addresses of anonymous contributors to Wikipedia.

To Read or Not to Read: That is the question, especially since 27 percent of Americans haven't read a single book in the last year.

Superfund365: Weeks later, this project is still going strong—cataloging a tour of 365 toxic sites in the U.S.

Coaching Pays: And it pays better than you might think, even at the college level.