2012 retrospective

The end of the year is nigh — time for our self-indulgent look-back at 2012. The most popular posts, not counting appearances on the main page. Remarkably, Shale vs tight has about twice the number of hits of the second place post. 

1. Shale vs tight, 1984 visits
2. G is for Gather, 1090 visits (to permalink)
3. What do you mean by average?, 1008 visits (to permalink)

The most commented-on posts are not necessarily the most-read. This is partly because posts get read for months after they're written, but comments tend to come right away. 

1. Are conferences failing you too? (16 comments)
2. Your best work(space) (13 comments)
3. The Agile toolbox (13 comments)

Evan	Matt
The texture attribute posts	The Agile toolbox
Polarity cartoons	The power of stack
The digital well scorecard	A mixing board for the seismic symphony

Personal favourites:

Where our readers come from

The distribution of readers is global, but has a power law distribution. About 75% of our readers this year were from one of nine countries: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Norway, India, Germany, Indonesia, and Russia. Some of those are big countries, so we should correct for population—let's look at the number of Agile blog readers per million citizens:

1. Norway — 292
2. Canada — 283
3. Australia — 108
4. UK — 78
5. Qatar — 72
6. Brunei — 67
7. Ireland — 57
8. Iceland — 56
9. Denmark — 46
10. Netherlands — 46

So we're kind of a big deal in Norway. Hei hei Norge! Kansje vi skulle skrive på norsk herifra.

Google Analytics tells us when people visit too. The busiest days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then Monday and Friday. Weekends are just crickets. Not surprisingly, the average reading time rises monotonically from Monday to Friday — reaching a massive 2:48 on Fridays. (Don't worry, dear manager, those are minutes!)

What we actually do

We don't write much about our work on this blog. In brief, here's what we've been up to:

• Volume interpretation and rock physics for a geothermal field in southern California
• Helping the Government of Canada get some of its subsurface data together
• Curating subsurface content in a global oil & gas company's corporate wiki
• Getting knowledge sharing off the ground at a Canadian oil & gas company

Oh yeah, we did launch this awesome little book too. That was a proud moment. 

We're looking forward to a fun-filled, idea-jammed, bee-busy 2013 — and wish the same for you. Thank you for your support and encouragement this year. Have a fantastic Yuletide.

Two hundred posts

The petrophysics cheasheet was one of our most popular posts

My post on Tuesday was the two hundredth post on our blog, which we started 19 months ago in November 2010. Though we began with about 15 posts per month, we have settled down to a rate of 7 or 8 posts per month, which feels sustainable. At this rate, it will be at least a year before we hit 300.

We hit 100 posts on 21 June last year, after only 222 days. In the 358 days since then we've had about 41 700 visits from 24 500 people in 152 countries. The most popular content is a little hard to gauge because of the way we run every post over the home page for a couple of weeks, but from the most recent 100 posts, the favourites are (in descending pageview order):

• G is for Gather (6 comments)
• Petrophysics cheatsheet (5)
• Why petrophysics is hard (5)
• I is for Integrated trace (7)
• Are you a poet or a mathematician? (13)
• Pseudogeophysics (8)
• Wherefore art thou, Expert? (12)
• Geophysical stamps 3: Geophone (10)
• The Agile toolbox (11)
• Stop waiting for permission to knock someone's socks off (10)

Someone asked recently how long our posts take to write. It varies quite a bit, especially if there are drawings or other graphics, but I think the average is about 4 hours, perhaps a little more. Posts follow an idea–draft–hack–review–publish process, and this might be months long: we currently have 52 draft posts in the pipeline! Some may never make it out...

We'd love to have some other voices on the site, so if you feel strongly about something in this field, or would like the right to reply to one of our opinion pieces, please get in touch. Or start a blog!

How to keep up with Agile*

I mentioned the other day that there are a few ways to keep up with this blog. I thought I'd list some of them out, in case you have not yet found one you like. 

The easiest thing for many is probably to get the email updates. They go out early in the morning the day after we put up a new post. We do not use your email address for anything else and would certainly never share it. To get these, just enter your email address in the box to the right →

If you already get them, don't worry, nothing has changed.

For many diehard blog readers, the only way is the RSS feed. You can access this from the link in the box on the right too. Just copy the URL of the feed [http://feeds.feedburner.com/agilegeoscience] into an RSS reader, sometimes called an aggregator. There are dozens — here's a list. Lots of people like Google Reader. Some people don't.

Visit our Twitter account to see what it's all about — no account requiredEvery new post is tweeted by the Twitter account @agilegeo. This is more or less all this Twitter account does, at least for now, so it's high signal-to-noise (if you consider our posts and comments signal, that is). These tweets also post to our Facebook page, so you can Like us to see the new posts in your Facebook feed.

We've started playing with Google+, but it's quite different from Facebook and Twitter, so is taking some getting used to. If you use Google+, follow Agile, me or Evan to get a smattering there. And Evan and I usually post about new writing in our LinkedIn profiles too, if you know us personally.

Lastly, there's always the trusty bookmark. Just remember to hit it occasionally. 

Thank you for reading! Seriously. Thank you.

The blog post

People sometimes eye Evan and I with suspicion when they ask about what we do. Even after a whole year of Agile, I admit I am sometimes at a loss for a snappy answer. In a nutshell, I'd say:

We solve geoscience problems for geoscientists. We like fast and useful solutions, not perfect or expensive solutions—we don't believe in perfect or expensive solutions. We love the things you might not have time for: data, technology, and documentation.

Above all, we love to help people. And that's what the blog is for: we want to be useful, mostly relevant, perhaps interesting, occasionally insightful. And we live on the edge of the continent and don't want to fall off, small and forgotten, into the North Atlantic. For us, the blog is a portal to Houston, Calgary, Aberdeen, Perth, and the rest of our world.

Is it worth it? Well, that depends how you measure 'worth it'. I reckon we spend 8 to 16 hours on an average of 3 weekly posts to the blog, so it's a substantial investment for us. A lot of it ends up in the wiki, or in a paper, or elsewhere; it's definitely a good catalyst for thinking, making useful stuff, and starting conversations. I don't think the blog has generated business purely on its own yet, but it has helped keep our profile up, and made us easier to find. 

Who reads it? We don't know for sure, but we have some clues. Our website has been visited almost exactly 30 000 times this year. We currently get about 800 visits a week, from about 550 unique visitors (shown in the chart above). Of those, about 30% are in the US, 20% are in Canada, 9% in the UK, then it's Australia, Germany, India, and Norway. The list contains 136 countries. This last fact alone fills us with joy, even if it's wrong by a factor of two.

How do the readers find us? About 140 people subscribe to our feed by email, which means they get an email alert the morning after we publish a post. Each week, only about 20 people come to us via Google, with search terms like seismic rock physics, agile geophysics, and tight gas vs shale gas. Since we announce new posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and now Google+ too), we get visitors from those sources too: they send about 24%, 18%, and 6% of our traffic respectively (G+ has too little data). The average visitor looks at 2.2 pages and stays for 3 mins and 2 seconds. But hey, 3 minutes is a long time on the Internet. Right?

If you were looking for some juicy geoscience, not this navel gazing, then check out our recent Greatest Hits, and have an amazing New Year! See you in 2012.

Blog traffic data are summarized from Google Analytics and are for interest only—the data are prone to all sorts of errors and artifacts. What's more, I do not have data for the first 6 weeks or so of traffic. Pinches of salt all round.

2011 retrospective

The year is almost over so we thought we'd highlight some of our favourite and our most popular posts from the year. We've posted something like 150 or so missives to this blog this year — nothing to boast about, but when we look over our work we do feel like we've achieved something. We've made a lot of new friends and acquaintances, which has been the greatest part of it. We've also learnt a lot about geoscience, especially when we've posted things at the edges of our knowledge... luckily we don't mind learning in plain sight! 

Most popular

One of the eye-opening things about running a website is the incredible statistics available from Google Analytics. There's no personal information, of course, but where readers clicked from, what they read, and for how long, where they went next, what browser they use... and that doesn't scratch the surface. After the main page, the most popular stops are: 

• Downloads (people want stuff!)
• About Us
• Articles — various scribblings and talks
• Evan's awesome Rock Physics Cheatsheet
• Our reading list
• The apps page
• The cheatsheets in general

After the cheatsheet posts, the most-visited posts are:

• The scales of geoscience, about being helicoptery
• Shale vs tight, about the differences between shale gas and tight gas reservoirs
• What is unconventional?, about ways to define unconventional resources
• Are you a poet or a mathematician?, about the language of uncertainty

Most commented

I have not been very rigorous and filtered our own comments here—we try to respond to every comment. Except the comments about Paul Smith shoes and Breitling watches, which I delete immediately (if you don't have a blog, you are perhaps blissfully unaware of the tedious amount of robo-spam that blogs and wikis attract—lucky for you!). Apart from the Where on (Google) Earth game posts, some of the most commented posts were:

• Wherefore art thou, Expert?, about coping without them
• Geophysical stamps 3: Geophone, mainly because of my mistake!
• Why we should embrace openness, about being less secretive in appled geoscience
• The simultaneity funnel, about the process of invention

Most favourite

Evan and I have posts we loved to write and share. For what it's worth, here they are:

Evan	Matt
Species identification in the rock kingdom	Pseudogeophysics
The Rock Physics Workshop series	Things not to think
Shattering shale	Learn to program

That's it! It's almost the end of a hair-raising year for both Evan and I, and one of the most satisfying parts of it has been meeting and conversing with you, dear reader. Thank you for investing your attention in us now and then.

And have a wonderful Christmas, Newtonmas, or whatever you celebrate round your way. Cheers!