EGU Blogs

A Year in Review

As of October 1st I have been a part of the now 1 year old EGU blog network for a year. I was honoured to be one of the original three network bloggers and looking back this had been a great year of geology blogging. Since we started the network has now grown from three to 10 great geology blogs. So here is a quick look back at the highlights of year 1.

A Slice of Earth Cake Geology Inspiration

Some nice digital birthday cake for us all! (Source)

A year by the numbers

Days: 365 (that one was easy)

Posts: 68

Total visits: 14,447

Total pageviews: 19,010

Average visit duration: 59 seconds

Most visits in a day: 547

Most pageviews in a day: 627

% New Visitors: 67.4

Number of countries: 130

All in all I am quite pleased and honoured that this many people have read or at least glanced at this blog.

Funny Search Terms

– are snakes part of the geosphere – Depends who you ask I suppose.

 house of commons verbal sparring – I am truly thrilled that this term found my blog, although I am not sure why this makes me so happy?

– scientific problem solved iodine-129 – Yay! Someone else but me searches Google for 129I.

spongebob – I used a pic of him as an analogy for pore space, but maybe I just taught a 7 year old about hydrogeology? I can hope!

geological mysteries – I try and explain as many geological mysteries as I can.

cantley quarry – Announcement for uOttawa first year geology students do not copy this post! You will be caught!

– #51 love poems – I have no idea how this found my blog, but awesome!

– canadian awesome – No argument here.

– green teach velocirators – This one is for Jon.

– i was holding three bottls of mineral in the dream – What a strange dream. I wonder what caused it….too much of something.

These are just the first 10 that I could find easily. There are loads more

Views from Interesting Nations

As of October 1, 2013 the blog had received visits from 130 countries or about 66.7% of all the nations in the world. Some of the more unusual ones to visit include: Greenland, the Maldives, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Qatar and the Faroe Islands. There are lots of others but these ones seemed interesting to me. The countries that represent the most views of this blog are: the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia. It is not really a surprise the 4 of the top 5 are mainly English speaking.

Highlights:

Being named a Science Seeker Award finalist for my post about radon.

Remotely being able to blog the EGU 2013 annual meeting using the online press releases. Here are the posts: 1, 2.

Blogging the 2013 Goldschmidt geochemistry conference from Florence, Italy on behalf of the EGU and EAG. Here are posts: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Banner stolen from the EGU Blog Network Hub (Source). A great place to visit for your daily geoscience reading.

Finally, thanks to everyone that has visited, read and commented on this blog. I really appreciate the support and here is looking forward to another year of great blogging…well 11 months!

Matt

Matt Herod is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the geochemistry of iodine and the radioactive isotope iodine-129. His work involves characterizing the cycle and sources of 129I in the Canadian Arctic and applying this to long term radioactive waste disposal and the effect of Fukushima fallout. His project includes field work and lab work at the André E. Lalonde 3MV AMS Laboratory. Matt blogs about any topic in geology that interests him, and attempts to make these topics understandable to everyone. Tweets as @GeoHerod.


2 Comments

  1. Happy blog-versary Matt! We hope to have GeoSphere on the EGU blog network for years to come!

    • Thanks Barbara!

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