Must-read geophysics blogs

Tuesday's must-read list was all about traditional publishing channels. Today, it's all about new media.

If you're anything like me before Agile, you don't read a lot of blogs. At least, not ones about geophysics. But they do exist! Get these in your browser favourites, or use a reader like Google Reader (anywhere) or Flipboard (on iPad).

Seismos

Chris Liner, a geophysics professor at the University of Arkansas, recently moved from the University of Houston. He's been writing Seismos, a parallel universe to his occasional Leading Edge column, since 2008.

MyCarta

Matteo Niccoli (@My_Carta on Twitter) is an exploration geoscientist in Stavanger, Norway, and he recently moved from Calgary, Canada. He's had MyCarta: Geophysics, visualization, image processing and planetary science, since 2011. This blog is a must-read for MATLAB hackers and image processing nuts. Matteo was one of our 52 Things authors.

GeoMika

Mika McKinnon (@mikamckinnon), a geophysicist in British Columbia, Canada, has been writing GeoMika: Fluid dynamics, diasters, geophysics, and fieldwork since 2008. She's also into education outreach and the maker-hacker scene.

The Way of the Geophysicist

Jesper Dramsch (@JesperDramsch), a geophysicist in Hamburg, Germany has written the wonderfully personal and philosophical The Way of The Geophysicist since 2011. His tales of internships at Fugro and Schlumberger provide great insights for students.

VatulBlog

Maitri Erwin (@maitri), an exploration geoscientist in Texas, USA. She has been blogging since 2001 (surely some kind of record), and both she and her unique VatulBlog: From Kuwait to Katrina and beyond defy categorization. Maitri was also one of our 52 Things authors. 

There are other blogs on topics around seismology and exploration geophysics — shout outs go to Hypocentre in the UK, the Laboratoire d'imagerie et acquisition des mesures géophysiques in Quebec, occasional seismicky posts from sedimentologists like @zzsylvester, and the panoply of bloggery at the AGU. Stick those in your reader!

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.

Journalists are scientists

Tim Radford. Image: Stevyn Colgan.On Thursday I visited The Guardian’s beautiful offices in King’s Cross for one of their Masterclass sessions. Many of them have sold out, but Tim Radford’s science writing evening did so in hours, and the hundred-or-so budding writers present were palpably excited to be there. The newspaper is one of the most progressive news outlets in the world, and boasts many venerable alumni (John Maddox and John Durant among them). It was a pleasure just to wander around the building with a glass of wine, with some of London’s most eloquent nerds.

Radford is not a trained scientist, but a pure journalist. He left school at 16, idolized Dylan Thomas, joined a paper, wrote like hell, and sat on almost every desk before mostly retiring from The Guardian in 2005. He has won four awards from the Association of British Science Writers. More people read any one of his science articles on a random Tuesday morning over breakfast than will ever read anything I ever write. Tim Radford is, according to Ed Yong, the Yoda of science writers.

Within about 30 minutes it became clear what it means to be a skilled writer: Radford’s real craft is story-telling. He is completely at home addressing a crowd of scientists — he knows how to hold a mirror up to the geeks and reflect the fun, fascinating, world-changing awesomeness back at them. “It’s a terrible mistake to think that because you know about a subject you are equipped to write about it,” he told us, getting at how hard it is to see something from within. It might be easier to write creatively, and with due wonder, about fields outside our own.

Some in the audience weren’t content with being entertained by Radford, watching him in action as it were, preferring instead to dwell on controversy. He mostly swatted them aside, perfectly pleasantly, but one thing he was having none of was the supposed divide between scientists and journalists. Indeed, Radford asserted that journalists and scientists do basically the same thing: imagine a story (hypothesis), ask questions (do experiments), form a coherent story (theory) from the results, and publish. Journalists are scientists. Kind of.

I loved Radford's committed and unapologetic pragmatism, presumably the result of several decades of deadlines. “You don’t have to be ever so clever, you just have to be ever so quick,” and as a sort of corollary: “You can’t be perfectly right, but you must be mostly right.” One questioner accused journalists of sensationalising science (yawn). “Of course we do!” he said — because he wants his story in the paper, and he wants people to read it. Specifically, he wants people who don’t read science stories to read it. After all, writing for other people is all about giving them a sensation of one kind or another.

I got so much out of the 3 hours I could write at least another 2000 words, but I won’t. The evening was so popular that the paper decided to record the event and experiment with a pay-per-view video, so you can get all the goodness yourself. If you want more Radford wisdom, his Manifesto for the simple scribe is a must-read for anyone who writes.

Tim Radford's most recent book, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things, came out in spring 2011.

The photograph of Tim Radford, at The World's Most Improbable Event on 30 September, is copyright of Stevyn Colgan, and used with his gracious permission. You should read his blog, Colganology. The photograph of King's Place, the Guardian's office building, is by flickr user Davide Simonetti, licensed CC-BY-NC.

Update on Saturday, October 6, 2012 at 7:15 PM by Matt Hall

I was surprised to find no Wikipedia article on Tim Radford, so I created one. If you know anything more about Mr Radford, please add to it (with citations, of course!).

I also made an edit to this post: I changed the wording of my reference to Radford as Yoda, to better match the tweet.

Ten things I loved about ScienceOnline2012

I spent Thursday and Friday at the annual Science Online unconference at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. I had been looking forward to it since peeking in on—and even participating in—sessions last January at ScienceOnline2011. As soon as I had emerged from the swanky airport and navigated my way to the charmingly peculiar Velvet Cloak Inn I knew the first thing I loved was...

Raleigh, and NC State University. What a peaceful, unpretentious, human-scale place. And the university campus and facilities were beyond first class. I was born in Durham, England, and met my wife at university there, so I was irrationally prepared to have a soft spot for Durham, North Carolina, and by extension Raleigh too. And now I do. It's one of those rare places I've visited and known at once: I could live here. I was still basking in this glow of fondness when I opened my laptop at the hotel and found that the hard drive was doornail dead. So within 12 hours of arriving, I had...

Click to read more ...

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.