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For you Twitter geeks out there, I’ve created a new Twitter account for Geology News. Whenever a new article is posted here on the website, you will be alerted to it in Twitter if you follow us.

Our account is here: http://www.twitter.com/geologynews

While this isn’t a huge deal for people who get their news from RSS feeds, this might benefit those obsessed with Twitter or want updates on their mobile platforms.

Update: We also have a Facebook page now as well. You can see it here.

I’m not *really* mad. It’s a pretty amusing meme really.

Oh no. Of all the memes to be spreading around the geoblogosphere, this one is the WORST. First off, no thanks to Chris over at Good Schist for passing this one along. If you are a regular reader of this site, you might want to stop.

Why is that, you might ask?

• 1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
• 2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
• 3. Post that picture with NO editing.
• 4. Post these instructions with your picture.

So I just got home early-early-early on a Saturday morning. What do *you* think I look like. Uh. My computer has a built in camera. Damn.

Source: The author, late on a Friday night / early Saturday morning.

You might notice the Croatian flag I have hanging behind me. You might also notice that you can partially see a New Zealand flag as well. That’s right. Thanks to Chris, I will be taking it down tomorrow.

Anyway, I feel like this meme might end up having similar ramifications to The Ring, only worse.

So now, I have to tag two other people to participate. Here we go:

1.) Maria at Green Gabbro
2.) Ron Schott

The Geology News blog sets a few milestones this week. In addition to breaking the 400 posts threshold, we’ve also seen an enormous spike in traffic to the website (mainly due to the unfortunate results of Hurricane Ike). We’ve had more visitors in the last week than we’ve seen in the last 5 months combined. It baffles my mind.

When we passed 300 posts back in April, I listed the 5 most popular articles of all time on this website. Here is a new update to see how things have changed:

1.) Hurricane Ike Aftermath - Galveston Photos
2.) Food - Erupting Volcano Cake
3.) Bakken Formation Could Boost Oil Reserves
4.) Montana / North Dakota has more oil than Alaska?
5.) Hurricane Ike Coastal Changes - Before and After Photos

Here are a few other breakdowns using data from Google Analytics:

• We’ve had visitors from 161 different countries.
• The majority of our visitors this week came from Texas.
• Internet Explorer is the most popular browser used on the website (66%), followed by Firefox (25%) and Safari (6%).
• Most popular operating systems: Windows (88%), Macintosh (10%), Linux (1.5%) and iPhone (0.22%, awesome!). Interesting caveat - I design and maintain this website using a Mac.
• The most popular search terms used to access this site: 1- geology news, 2- volcano cake, 3- bakken formation
• Fellow geoblogosphere sites that have sent me the most visitors: 1- The Volcanism Blog, 2- NOVA Geoblog, 3- ScienceBlog affiliates (I’m not able to break down which specific ScienceBlogs sites sent me the most traffic at the moment).

Alright, so a lot of people have responded to Chuck’s post about 50 essential minerals. I’ve created two tag clouds (similar to the tag clouds that Brian Romans tag clouds that Brian Romans wrote about back in May) that show the most popular minerals people have posted about so far.

1.) Most Popular Minerals Observed in the Field

2.) Most Popular Minerals Observed in a Lab / Museum

I think this data makes much more sense than my previous try, which just combined ALL the data in a single tag cloud.

UPDATE: I think I will redo entire this word cloud. Since most people are using Chuck’s original list and also adding some of their own minerals, I might try to break this down into two lists. Otherwise the relative sizes of many of the minerals won’t change since it will be included on everyone’s list. This is probably what I will end up creating…
1.) The Most Popular Minerals Observed in the Field
2.) The Most Popular Minerals Observed in a Museum / Lab

UPDATE 2: Done!

More Information

• All My Faults Are Stress Related
• Clastic Detritus
• Dinochick Blogs
• geoberg.de-Blog (in German)
• Geology News
• Geotripper
• Highly Allochthonous
• Hypo-Theses
• Looking for Detachment
• Lost Geologist
• Lounge of the Lab Lemming
• Magma Cum Laude
• Musings of a Life-Long Scholar
• NOVA Geoblog

Callan Bently at the NOVA Geoblog is asking the geoblogging community to participate in a survey.

He is giving a talk at an upcoming meeting for the Geological Society of Washington about the rise of the geoblogosphere and would like to use some research data he is gathering about the community in his talk.

You can go ahead and take the survey here. He needs all responses by September 15th.

More information is available here.