Year in blogging 2008

I quite liked this meme last year; it provides an overview of my blogging in the past 12 months, without taking up the time, or the excessive navel-gazing, required for a more traditional retrospective. I also really like Brian’s twist of posting the first image from each month, as well as the first sentence, so I’ve shamelessly borrowed it (in many cases, the image is linked to a different post than the sentence is).

• January: You may have noticed a distinct lack of activity around here in the past week or three.

  




• February: I’ve been out in the field for the past couple of days (the South African weather having picked up just in time to completely fry me), and my travels have yielded me a deskcrop that I’m very proud of.

  




• March: Yesterday marked one year since I moved to Scienceblogs, so I was in a navel-gazing mood even before a post over at Bayblab caused a few other people around here to get all retrospective (look on my evil incestuous linking, ye mortals, and despair!).

  




• April: Given some of the other shenanigans that were percolating through the geoblogosphere yesterday, I was understandably a little bit cautious when I noticed a couple of familiar names popping up in the contents list for Nature Geoscience that arrived in my inbox yesterday.

  

• 
  

• May: Brian’s had the cool idea of summarising some of his pending scientific papers using tag clouds, and I’m joining Lab Lemming, ReBecca and Maria in jumping on the bandwagon.

  accommodated acquisition al appears arc bay boundary chrm data declination deformation directions early et faults field figure hikurangi however island km localities ma magnetization margin miocene north observed overprints paleomagnetic pdf plate pliocene present rates region remanence roberts rotation sediments south southern structures table tectonic test timing walcott zealand zone
  created at TagCrowd.com




• June: Good news, everbody! It seems that the continuing growth of the geoblogosphere is starting to get noticed, with articles in both the AAPG Explorer and Geotimes, who together appear to have interviewed a good number of us.

  




• July: Thermochronic has already written about this, but just in case you missed it, the Great Southern California Shakeout, an interesting exercise in raising earthquake awareness amongst the denizens of Los Angeles and its environs, is taking place in November.

  




• August: There’s a curious story on the BBC website which highlights the fact that, despite the ready availability of pictures like this:

  

  there are still people out there who think that the world looks more like this.




• September: Spending time in my home country has become a rather fraught affair in the last couple of years – because I don’t live here, and my family and most of my friends still do, any visit back to British shores becomes a mad rush around all the various corners of the UK that people I know have spread themselves around into.

  




• October: Last weekend, I turned 30.

  




• November: Last week was my first visit to Cape Town, a place about which I had heard much, both before and after I moved to South Africa.

  




• December: When I initially signed up for ScienceOnline 09, I really wasn’t sure that I could afford to go.

  [No December pictures yet…]

I leave the question of what this all means – other than the fact that I’m fond of early month navel-gazing, and am rather too keen on long and complicated sentences – as an exercise for the reader.