After a rather uneventful trip to San Francisco this morning, I arrived in the city this afternoon to beautiful temperatures and the sun, unlike Missoula the past few days, which has been below 0 degrees!

With it being a travel day, and my first day of the conference, I visited the Moscone Center (conference hub) to pick up my poster and badge and set up my oral presentation for tomorrow.

In the afternoon, I attended a packed bloggers forum, where the presenters spoke about starting blogs, how to create content, and what they blog about. These presenters are part of the AGU Blogosphere and are hosted  by AGU to blog about their own experiences and research.

Another important thing they talked about is knowing what your audience needs. This is similar to journalism in that the writing is for the reader, not for you! Just because you may want to talk about something in long-form doesn’t mean that your audience wants to read it in long-form, for example. Mostly, the audience is interested in current events, photos, and specific tags, as some of the bloggers mentioned. Below are the bloggers who were involved in the panel and links to their blog!:

• Dr. Laura Guertin (or Dr. G, if you have heard me talk about her)
• Jessica Ball – Magma Cum Laude
• Austin Elliot – The Trembling Earth
• Larry O’Hanlon – social media manager/blog curator for AGU

The panel also stressed that views are often driven from Twitter, which I find in my own blog. People who don’t subscribe to me by e-mail have to find me somewhere else, and since I send my posts to Twitter automatically, a lot of traffic comes from there.

Next, as I did last year, I attended the “Open Mic Night,” full of raps, haikus, poems, and songs about science.. And I have to admit, I didn’t know most of the terms, but it was still enjoyable all the same. My favorites were a poem about oysters and a rap about something atmospheric (by someone who dubbed his rap name as MC02).

I can’t forget Richard Alley! Last year, I took his Geology of the National Parks class while at Penn State, in which he performed musical numbers to help us study (and also inspired blog posts about the geology of Nevada and California).

Tonight, I will be preparing for my “Water Sciences Pop-Ups” session (oral presentation), which is tomorrow at 8:30am!