16 December 2010

AGU Fall Meeting 2010: Wednesday Dec. 15

Posted by Jessica Ball

Another AGU update! Wednesday was a bit of a break for me – in the morning, I presented a poster of my research in Guatemala (V31C-2335, “Alteration minerals on the Santiaguito lava dome complex, Santa Maria volcano, Guatemala”). It went very well; despite the feeling I always have of being back at high school science fair, I had some great conversations with the folks who stopped by, and even made a few professional contacts).

Lunch was an excellent gathering of the geobloggers attending AGU, and I think we had some useful conversations on the future of social media in a professional organization. We discussed expanding the presence of Twitter and blogging, and ways to make meetings more accessible to those who can’t attend due to cost or geography, and how to attract the interest of the general, non-AGU public through social media as well as publications. Not to mention that I finally got a chance to put faces with the names I’m so familiar with from the interwebs!

I took Wednesday afternoon off to do some exploring, something that I always try to do at these large conferences. It’s too easy to get completely burned out from too many talks and posters, and since this is my first visit to San Francisco since I was three, I felt I needed to get out of the conference center. I took the cable cars from Powell Street all the way to the Fisherman’s Warf and wandered around the Maritime Museum and the Municipal Pier, and I was lucky enough to get some amazing photos in beautiful weather. (I’ll be posting those later, since I’ve gone and left my camera cord at the hotel.)

Today is a bit slow in the morning, so plenty of time for posters and exhibits, but the afternoon will be plenty busy. If you can, come by the Science Blogging workshop in the Press Conference Room in Moscone West at 2PM and see a whole crowd of geobloggers discussing the motivations, benefits and challenges of communicating science via today’s social media outlets.