The Earth story ... a facebook world in the geo blogosphere

Facebook has become one of the dominant virtual worlds of our planet, and among the plethora of cute pictures of cats and unintelligible photos of plates of food are a few gems that attract a strong following. I have been contributing as an 'admin' to one facebook community - 'The Earth Story', over the past few months. The initial driver was writing short pieces of geo-news for my first-year undergraduate students, but quickly I discovered that far more people were reading the small newsy items on facebook than would ever hear my lectures or read my academic papers. This is not to negate the latter, but highlights the capacity for short snippets of Earth Science news from the virtual community out there. Each post on 'The Earth Story' (TES) typically gets read by more than 100k people, and the page has more than 0.5 million followers. Such outlets offer great opportunities for conveying the excitement and challenges of our subject, and the responses from readers often take the discussion further. Since contributing to TES I have also had the opportunity to work for 6 weeks at the BBC as a science journalist in BBC world service radio and online news, and again have seen the appetite for readers for good science stories. Here, I reflect on these experiences and consider the challenge of bringing cutting edge discovery to a general audience, and how social media offer routes to discovery that bypass traditional vehicles.