Geoscience Community on Google+

Back in early December, Google+ unveiled a new way of interacting online called "Communities".  The primary idea is to connect with others who share a common interest.  They are similar to a lot of various internet groups, but being designed with the G+ platform they allow for a lot of useful & interesting ways to share content.

Shortly after they were introduced, I started up a Geoscience Community.  I quickly added +Michael Klaas,  geoblogger at The Cascadia Blog (formerly Uncovered Earth), as a fellow moderator based on our history of curating a shared geoscience circle.  The community is public, meaning anyone with a Google+ account can join and the posts can also be found in Google search.  It is my hope that this community will draw in more geoscientists to join the conversation about all things geoscience.

The community has grown steadily, with new geoscientists contributing daily.  The community has attracted a wide following with currently over 4000 members, but the value of the community is in the quality of the content shared.  Because of the very large numbers, I have been working to help the community have quality posts.  We've put together a list of sub-topics to help keep the posts organized into categories, such as Geoblogs, Volcanology, Structure-Tectonics, Oceanography, and Planetary Geology, for example.  I've also put together a post in the community on "Posting Guidelines" that should assist folks in sharing relevant content.  The posts therefore are curated & filtered - unrelated posts are removed as soon as we see them.  The group is intended for all content that is geoscience related, and we define geoscience broadly to include not just geology, but also relevant content from astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, & geography.

So if you're a geoscientist or a geoscience enthusiast, you're welcome to join the group!  I encourage people to click on the topics on the left side and see the great content that's been shared in the past 2 months.  I'd also love for some professional geoscience organizations to join the community, share with it, participate in the management of it, and promote it to their members.

Why Google+?
My desire is to see more geoscientists connect through social media.  Many use facebook and twitter accounts.  Facebook works well for family & friends, but it doesn't work well for professional contacts or connecting with others around a shared common interest.  Google+ makes managing all kinds of personal connections simple through circles, removing the awkwardness of "friend requests" from people you may not know on a personal level.  Like Twitter, you can follow someone without them following you back (or vice-versa), but you can also easily share with a limited audience by using circles.  Twitter works well for quick, short links & comments, and many geoscientists have combined using twitter with geoblogs in order to establish online connections.  Clearly, the majority of geoscientists who participate in social media are using twitter, and many enjoy it; that's great for those for whom it works.  Personally, I've found twitter to be very useful for some things, but for the most part I'm frustrated by the limiting nature of it.  Obviously tweets are short, and there have been a number of times where I've wished for more characters than 140.  But additionally there are other limiting factors.  Conversations, for example, are challenging to maintain since the comments aren't collected in a single place.  To compensate, some geotweeps use Storify as a way to document & save these conversations, which works well if you are willing to use another website service necessary to record & keep these conversations.  Furthermore, tagging other geotweeps in the tweet further reduces the number of allowed characters for content.  Photo sharing is also possible, but many resort to storing their photos on another site, such as Flickr, adding yet another website service for many uses.  Links are also easily shared, but the content that one might expect to find at the link is often cryptic, because there is no preview except what the user adds in text.  Google+ is able to do all of these things very well, making it a one-stop social media site.  Those who are happy with twitter are not likely to switch over to a new network.  I'm more interesting in bringing more geoscientists into the geosocial world, perhaps those who have used facebook to connect with friends, family, & maybe students, but haven't yet established a way to connect with fellow professionals and aren't interested in using twitter.  In other words, I hope to drawn in a larger number of geoscientists into participating with one another online, not just appeal to those that are already using other social media tools.

Call for Posts: Accretionary Wedge 48: Geoscience & Technology #AW48

This month, July 2012, I'm hosting The Accretionary Wedge, and the topic that I've chosen is "Geoscience & Technology".  There is no question that technology has played an enormous role in the furthering of geoscience, and I'd like to assemble a series of posts from the geoblogosphere that describes the relationship.  So, fellow geobloggers, how do you perceive technology impacting the work you do?

What to blog about?
I can think of a number of different directions that this topic can go.  For example, if you're a geophysicist, you might discuss how some of the equipment you use works.  If you're a geochemist, maybe you would like to explain how your fancy new ICP-MS measures those super cool isotope ratios.  Maybe you'd like to post about GIS, GPS, Google Earth, or mobile technology.  An epic post on how GPS receivers use billion dollar satellites to determine spatial location would be a welcome addition.  Someone could use this opportunity to give some press to their favorite istuffs or Android apps.  Perhaps you could highlight how a technological development in the past lead to new data that were not previously possible.  Maybe someone will go uber-meta and post about the technology of social media and it's importance to the future of geoscience (any takers?).  Whatever it is, feel free to discuss how you see technology making an impact on geoscience.  Let's put together a great collection of posts!

How this works (mainly for new folks!):  
The Accretionary Wedge is a geology blog carnival; in other words, about once a month a topic is sent out (like this post) and geobloggers write up their contribution to the topic at hand on their blogs.  Anyone in geoscience is welcome to participate.  Especially if you've never contributed before to geoscience blogging, don't be afraid to dip in a toe and test out the waters.  You're welcome to join and add your voice to this conversation.  The deadline for this event is the end of the month, July 31, 2012.  Before that deadline, write up your post & publish it on your blog - start up a blog if necessary! :-).  I recommend including references & links to The Accretionary Wedge blog and this Call for Posts.  Not sure how your post will fit in?  It's called the "Accretionary Wedge" for a reason!  All rock types are allowed in this rock garden.  Sometime in August, I'll read through all of the posts (that I know about!), write up a summary, and post it here on my blog.  In other words, I need to know about your post, so please leave a link to your post in the comments below.  You can also tag me in a post on Google+ or mention me in a tweet (@EarthlikePlanet) if you post a link to your contribution on those social networks (but the more that post links here, the easier it will be on me to corral them all).  Let's go with hashtag #AW48.  As to the deadline: if I haven't posted the summary blog post yet, then you might consider the deadline as more of a "guideline".  Questions?  

Geo Culture Snapshot I

There's no secret that geologists have some common ways of going about life and our business.  Although the culture of geoscientists is yet to form the basis for any dissertations yet, there are nonetheless millions of pictures out there showing us at our best... and sometimes not so best I suppose...

For instance, we geologists love our geo-T-shirts. Here's one I spotted this last week at the SERC Teaching MPG workshop.

And here's another pic showing geoscientists putting thermodynamics to good use.