The blog post

People sometimes eye Evan and I with suspicion when they ask about what we do. Even after a whole year of Agile, I admit I am sometimes at a loss for a snappy answer. In a nutshell, I'd say:

We solve geoscience problems for geoscientists. We like fast and useful solutions, not perfect or expensive solutions—we don't believe in perfect or expensive solutions. We love the things you might not have time for: data, technology, and documentation.

Above all, we love to help people. And that's what the blog is for: we want to be useful, mostly relevant, perhaps interesting, occasionally insightful. And we live on the edge of the continent and don't want to fall off, small and forgotten, into the North Atlantic. For us, the blog is a portal to Houston, Calgary, Aberdeen, Perth, and the rest of our world.

Is it worth it? Well, that depends how you measure 'worth it'. I reckon we spend 8 to 16 hours on an average of 3 weekly posts to the blog, so it's a substantial investment for us. A lot of it ends up in the wiki, or in a paper, or elsewhere; it's definitely a good catalyst for thinking, making useful stuff, and starting conversations. I don't think the blog has generated business purely on its own yet, but it has helped keep our profile up, and made us easier to find. 

Who reads it? We don't know for sure, but we have some clues. Our website has been visited almost exactly 30 000 times this year. We currently get about 800 visits a week, from about 550 unique visitors (shown in the chart above). Of those, about 30% are in the US, 20% are in Canada, 9% in the UK, then it's Australia, Germany, India, and Norway. The list contains 136 countries. This last fact alone fills us with joy, even if it's wrong by a factor of two.

How do the readers find us? About 140 people subscribe to our feed by email, which means they get an email alert the morning after we publish a post. Each week, only about 20 people come to us via Google, with search terms like seismic rock physics, agile geophysics, and tight gas vs shale gas. Since we announce new posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and now Google+ too), we get visitors from those sources too: they send about 24%, 18%, and 6% of our traffic respectively (G+ has too little data). The average visitor looks at 2.2 pages and stays for 3 mins and 2 seconds. But hey, 3 minutes is a long time on the Internet. Right?

If you were looking for some juicy geoscience, not this navel gazing, then check out our recent Greatest Hits, and have an amazing New Year! See you in 2012.

Blog traffic data are summarized from Google Analytics and are for interest only—the data are prone to all sorts of errors and artifacts. What's more, I do not have data for the first 6 weeks or so of traffic. Pinches of salt all round.

I dare you

It has taken me almost a week to decompress from the session with Seth Godin I wrote about last week. I haven't been procrastinating, just overwhelmed. The three days were full of Seth's stories; vivid, succinct, entertaining, and persuasive. The aggregate of his ideas hit me hard, in my stomach, like a swinging wrecking ball of change. Though I'm still reeling, I feel inspired to share at least a few points that are sticking. If they seem but partly formed, it's because they are.

We are creatures of inertia

We move and accelerate with linear momentum, which makes it very hard for us to turn. In fact, the more momentum we have, the more difficult it is. There is a revolution going on right now that is changing our economy and changing our lives; the connection revolution. This revolution won't last forever, maybe 15 years, and it will be marked by notions of flipping scarcity and abundance.

Strategy, skills, and caring

Any task worth doing, or innovation to be made, pulls from three sides of a triangle. Seth described that you first need a strategy; a plan, or methodology. Second, you need the skills to execute. Third, and most importantly, you need to care so much about your goal that you are willing to fail at it. A hefty portion of time was spent navigating through our preponderance of fear, and the excuses we use to convince ourselves from caring enough. I'm going to apply more of my skills to the things that deeply interest me, things that I am more likely to care a lot about. Often times, as an industry collective, or as individuals, we are afraid to destroy what is perfect in order to enable what is possible.

Ship-it

The ship-it point is the moment in time when a project is finished and it released it out into the world. Seth offered a persuasive plan that gets serious about shipping. The process of writing down your goals, and documenting your daily progress is not enough. It requires a thoughtful step by step analysis of all the factors that might get in the way. I'm going to work harder next year in going through this process, writing out my expectations by hand, and documenting my progress toward acheiving them. I will ship more in 2012.

Small, remarkable things

The food at meetings and conferences is usually not memorable, but the lunch on the last day was different. He brought in "the best thai food in New York"—one item was a best selling item not even listed on the menu. "Don't throw the plastic bowls away," he shouted to the group over lunch, "I'll be taking them home to wash and return them." Well, I made sure to eat every last morsel in my bowl, not only because it was delicious, but I couldn't stand the thought of Seth having to scrape my bowl clean in his kitchen sink! That was just one of the many small gestures, that were remarkable, and it was heartwarming. 

And another thing that sticks, were the nametags that he printed up. My first name is printed in large bold font, and in parentheses undernearth, I dare you.

Where are you headed?

Read this book!I am sitting in the Halifax airport waiting to board my plane to New York. I'm going to a different kind of conference, er... course, er... workshop. In fact I don't really know what to call it. Maybe it is a class. A three-day class for getting stuff done, for getting moving.

Myself and 60 other participants will be spending a three-day session with Seth Godin. Seth is an entrepreneur, a best-selling author of 14 books, and a self-proclaimed agent of change. Matt and I are both avid daily readers of his blog, which, judging by its immense popularity, you might be too (to find it you need only type 'seth' into Google). I am surprised by how often his writing and his teaching feels relevant to what Matt and I are trying to do at Agile*. Relevant to professionalism, to spreading ideas, to doing necessary work.

I cannot contain my excitement... and I am a little scared. It's strange meeting someone who I know a bit about, whose words I read every day, but who knows nothing about me. I was told that about 500 people applied to attend this event, but fewer than 70 got the chance to buy a ticket. As sort of a personal manifesto, I decided to share my application here. If nothing else, it is a proclamation of how I have come to see myself, and where I wish to head. Admittedly, Seth probably doesn't care too much about the details of my technical expertise, but I thought he certainly would care about our approach to business, communication, and connecting. This is what I shared with him to get in, so might as well share it here. In his characteristically cut-to-the-chase vein, he asked only two questions:

What do you do? (in 100 words or less)

I am a consultant who does geology, geophysics, and 3D computer modeling for energy companies. I am partnered with another guy and we have formed a renegade start-up, bootstrapping a business venture together. We both work remotely from small towns in Nova Scotia and are experimenting with new media approaches for connecting our industry.

My work is a blend of billable contract work and open knowledge sharing.

We blog about things that interest us in science, geology, and the energy industry. We make science apps for mobile devices for knowledge sharing and spreading ideas. We also curate an all-access wiki for underground science. We are also compiling a book that will be crowd sourced from industry experts.

Where are you headed? (Most important question, what can I help you do?)

Mine is an industry where innovation happens slowly, yet it is one of the most technologically and computationally advanced fields. Change is discouraged by corporate hierarchies getting in the way of progress.

I want to better understand my role in this revolution. I have the freedom and flexibility to implement ideas, and I am building the courage and insight to be positively disruptive.

I am an advocate of openness and sharing, especially when it comes to applied science. I want to explore how deep our market is, because knowledge sharing should be done by scientists, not by IT departments.

We've been hacking away for about 10 months with many projects on the go. Some of them will be revenue generating, some of them will be attention generating, some of them will fail. You can help by giving perspectives, spotting points of resistance with my projects, how to know when I am stretching too thin, and how my work can be even more creative.

Being a technology geek and consultant it is humbling to read the bios of some of the other people starting a movement, actualizing inspiration. I am certainly going to be the only petroleum geophysicist there. Other attendees include a physicist studying organization behaviour at Google, an economist at the US national defence fund, a women's rights social entrepreneur, and one of the founders of Tom's shoes. People, strangers from different businesses and different niche’s coming together to create something. Breathe the same air, share the same joys and fears of a precious opportunity that lay ahead. What a crazy idea. I love it. Exposing what we are good at to the world.

I have no idea what to expect, it is already surreal, and I can hardly wait.

McKelvey's reserves and resources

Vincent McKelvey (right) was chief geologist at the US Geological Survey, and then its director from 1971 until 1977. Rather like Sherman Kent at the CIA, who I wrote about last week, one of his battles was against ambiguity in communication. But rather than worrying about the threat posed by the Soviet Union or North Korea, his concern was the reporting of natural resources in the subsurface of the earth. Today McKelvey's name is associated with a simple device for visualizing levels of uncertainty and risk associated with mineral resources: the McKelvey box.

Here (left) is a modernized version. It helps unravel some oft-heard jargon. The basic idea is that only discovered, commercially-viable deposits get to be called Reserves. Discovered but sub-commercial (with today's technology and pricing) are contingent resources. Potentially producible and viable deposits that we've not yet found are called prospective resources. These are important distinctions, especially if you are a public company or a government.

Over time, this device has been reorganized and subdivided with ever more subtle distinctions and definitions. I was uninspired by the slightly fuzzy graphics in the ongoing multi-part review of reserve reporting in the CSPG Reservoir magazine (Yeo and Derochie, 2011, Reserves and resources series, CSPG Reservoir, starting August 2011). So I decided to draw my own version. To reflect the possiblity that there may yet be undreamt-of plays out there, I added a category for Unimagined resources. One for the dreamers.

You can find the Scalable Vector Graphics file for this figure in SubSurfWiki. If you have ideas about other jargon to add, or ways to represent the uncertainty, please have a go at editing the wiki page, the figure, or drop us a line!

Frontiers at the Forum

The SEG Forum was the main attraction on Day 1 of the SEG Annual Meeting in San Antonio. Several people commented that the turnout was rather poor, however, with no more than 400 people sitting in the Lila Cockrell Theatre, even at the start. Perhaps the event needs more publicity. There was plenty of time for questions from the audience, all of which the panel discussed quite candidly.

David Lawrence, Executive VP of Exploration and Commercial at Shell gave, predictably, a rather dry corporate presentation. We understand how presentations like this get hijacked by lawyers and corporate communications departments, but wish more executives would stand up to their captors, especially for a short presentation to a technical audience. Despite his shackles, he had some eyebrow-raising technology to brag about: futuristic autonomous-vehicle marine nodes, and a million-channel sensor network, a project development they're developing with HP, of all companies.

Tim Dodson, Executive VP of Exploration at Statoil and once Matt's boss there, seemed similarly held captive by his corporation's presentation sanitizers. Saved by his charisma, Tim characterized Statoil's steady approach in exploration: deep pockets, patience, and being comfortable with risk. They seem to have the same approach to technology innovation, as Tim highlighted their Source Rock from Seismic method for characterizing source rocks and the high-resolution spectral decomposition technology we wrote about recently. Both projects took several years to develop, and have paid off in discoveries like Aldous and Skrugard respectively.

Susan Cunningham, Senior VP of Exploration at Noble Energy, spoke about her company's approach to frontier exploration. Despite her chronic use of buzz-phrases (innovative thinking, integrated objective assessment, partner of choice), Susan gave a spirited outlook on the human angles of Noble's frontier thinking. She discussed Noble's perseverance in the Eastern Mediterranean 8.5 Tcf Tamar discovery in the Levant Basin, and went on to describe Noble as a large company in a small company framework, but we're not sure what that means. Is it good?

Carl Trowell, president of WesternGeco and the youngest panelist, was the most engaging (and convincing) speaker. Shell's corporate communications people need to see presentations like this one: more powerful and trustable for its candid, personal, style. As you'd expect, he had deep insight into where seismic technolology is going. He lamented that seismic is not used enough in risk mitigation for frontier wells; for example, borehole seismic-while-drilling, imaged in the time it takes to trip out of the hole, can help predict pore pressure and other hazards in near-real-time. His forward-looking, energetic style was refreshing and inspiring.

It was a slightly dry, but basically up-beat, kick-off to the meeting. Some high-altitude perspective before we helicopter down to the nitty-gritty of the talks this afternoon.

Click here for all the posts about SEG 2011

AVO* is free!

The two-bit experiment is over! We tried charging $2 for one of our apps, AVO*, as a sort of techno-socio-geological experiment, and the results are in: our apps want to be free. Here are our download figures, as of this morning: 

You also need to know when these apps came out. I threw some of the key statistics into SubSurfWiki and here's how they stack up when you account for how long they've been available:

It is clear that AVO* has performed quite poorly compared to its peers! The retention rate (installs/downloads) is 100% — the price tag buys you loyalty and even a higher perceived value perhaps? But the hit in adoption is too much to take. 

There are other factors: quality, relevance, usefulness, ease-of-use. It's hard to be objective, but I think AVO* is our highest quality app. It certainly has the most functionality, hence this experiment. It is rather niche: many geological interpreters may have no use for it. But it is certainly no more niche than Elastic*, and has about four times the functionality. On the downside, it needs an internet connection for most of its juicy bits.

In all, I think that we might have expected 200 installs for the app by now, from about 400–500 downloads. I conclude that charging $2 has slowed down its adoption by a factor of ten, and hereby declare it free for everyone. It deserves to be free! If you were one of the awesome early adopters that paid a toonie for it, I have only this to say to you: we love you.

So, if you have an Android device, scan the code or otherwise hurry to the Android Market!

Bad Best Practice

Applied scientists get excited about Best Practice. New professionals and new hires often ask where 'the manual' is, and senior technical management or chiefs often want to see such documentation being spread and used by their staff. The problem is that the scientists in the middle strata of skill and influence think Best Practice is a difficult, perhaps even ludicrous, concept in applied geoscience. It's too interpretive, too creative.

But promoting good ideas and methods is important for continuous improvement. At the 3P Arctic Conference in Halifax last week, I saw an interesting talk about good seismic acquisiton practice in the Arctic of Canada. The presenter was Michael Enachescu of MGM Energy, well known in the industry for his intuitive and integrated approach to petroleum geoscience. He gave some problems with the term best practice, advocating instead phrases like good practice:

• There's a strong connotation that it is definitively superlative
• The corollary to this is that other practices are worse
• Its existence suggests that there is an infallible authority on the subject (an expert)
• Therefore the concept stifles innovation and even small steps towards improvement

All this is reinforced by the way Best Practice is usually written and distributed:

• Out of frustration, a chief commissions a document
• One or two people build a tour de force, taking 6 months to do it
• The read-only document is published on the corporate intranet alongside other such documents
• Its existence is announced and its digestion mandated

Unfortunately, the next part of the story is where things go wrong:

• Professionals look at the document and find that it doesn't quite apply to their situation
• Even if it does apply, they are slightly affronted at being told how to do their job
• People know about it but lack the technology or motivation to change how they were already working
• Within 3 years there is enough new business, new staff, and new technology that the document is forgotten about and obselete, until a high-up commissions a document...

So the next time you think to yourself, "We need a Best Practice for this", think about trying something different:

• Forget top-down publishing, and instead seed editable, link-rich documents like wiki pages
• Encourage discussion and ownership by the technical community, not by management
• Request case studies, which emphasize practical adaptability, not theory and methodology
• Focus first on the anti-pattern: common practice that is downright wrong

How do you spread good ideas and methods in your organization? Does it work? How would you improve it?

What is commercial?

Just another beautiful geomorphological locality in Google's virtual globe software, a powerful teaching aid and just downright fun to play withAt one of my past jobs, we were not allowed to use Google Earth: 'unlicensed business use is not permitted'. So to use it we had to get permission from a manager, then buy the $400 Professional license. This came about because an early End-User License Agreement (EULA) had stipulated 'not for business use'. However, by the time the company had figured out how to enforce this stipulation with an auto-delete from PCs every Tuesday, the EULA had changed. The free version was allowed to be used in a business context (my interpretation: for casual use, learning, or illustration), but not for direct commercial gain (like selling a service). Too late: it was verboten. A game-changing geoscience tool was neutered, all because of greyness around what commercial means. 

Last week I was chastised for posting a note on a LinkedIn discussion about our AVO* mobile app. I posted it to an existing discussion in a highly relevant technical group, Rock Physics. Now, this app costs $2, in recognition of the fact that it is useful and worth something. It will not be profitable, simply because the total market is probably well under 500 people. The discussion was moved to Promotions, where it will likely never be seen. I can see that people don't want blatant commeriality in technical discussion groups. But maybe we need to apply some common sense occasionally: a $2 mobile app is different from a $20k software package being sold for real profit. Maybe that's too complicated and 'commercial means commercial'. What do you think?

But then again, really? Is everyone in applied science not ultimately acting for commercial gain? Is that not the whole point of applied science? Applied to real problems... more often than not for commercial gain, at some point and by somebody. It's hopelessly idealistic, or naïve, to think otherwise. Come to think of it, who of us can really say that what we do is pure academy? Even universities make substantial profits—from their students, licensing patents, or spinning off businesses. Certainly most research in our field (hydrocarbons and energy) is paid for by commercial interests in some way.

I'm not saying that the reason we do our work is for commercial gain. Most of us are lucky enough to love what we do. But more often than not, it's the reason we are gainfully employed to do them. It's when we try to draw that line dividing commercial from non-commercial that I, for one, only see greyness.

To free, or not to free?

Yesterday, Evan and I published our fourth mobile app for geoscientists. It's called AVO*, it does reflectivity modeling, and it costs $2. 

Two bucks?? What's the point? Why isn't it free? Well, it went something like this...

- So, this new app: is it free?
- Well, all our apps are free. I guess it's free.
- Yeah, we don't want to stop it from spreading. If it wants to spread, that is...
- But does free look... worthless? I mean, 'you get what you pay for', right? Look at all the awesome stuff we pay for: Amazon web services, Squarespace web hosting, Hover domain hosting, awesome computers,...
- So what would we charge?
- What do other people charge? 
- There are no 'other people'... But there are technical apps for oil and gas out there. Most of them cost $1.99, some are $4.99, one or two are $9.99. Who knows how many downloads they get? 
- I bet the total revenue is constant: if you charge $1 and get 1000 downloads, then you'll get 100 at $10. But that's an experiment you can never do—once you've charged some amount, you can't really go up. Or down.
- How do other people decide what to charge?
- I guess traditionally you might use a cost-plus model: the cost of production, plus a profit margin.
- What's our cost of production?
- Well, a few days of time... let's call it $5000. If we wanted to make $10 000, and only expect 500 people to even be in the market... It doesn't work. No-one will pay $20 for a cell phone widget.
- Won't they just expense it?
- Maybe... I don't think the industry is quite there yet.
- Hmm... I downloaded an app for $20 once [a seismograph]. And another for $10 [a banjo tuner]. I don't even think about paying $1 or $2. That amount is basically free. $1 is free.
- But a buck... isn't it just a pain to even get your credit card out?
- Well, once you're set up in Google Checkout, or iTunes or whatever, it's essentially one click. And then we get a sense of the real user base. The hard core!
- Yeah... right now about 50% of people who install an app nuke it a few days later.
- At least if it's under $5 we probably won't have to deal with refunds and other nonsense.
- Arrgghhhh... why is this so hard? 
- Let's make it $2. 
- Let's make it free.
- But this app is awesome. Awesome shouldn't be free. Awesome is never free. Awesome costs. 
- But isn't this really just a thing that says "Agile is awesome, check us out, hire us"? It's marketing.
- Maybe... but it's useful too. It works. It does something. It has Science Inside™. People will get $1-worth out of it every time they use it. If this was a <insert energy software empire> app it would cost $10 000.
- Can we ask people to pay what they want? Like what Radiohead did with In Rainbows?
- No because they're already huge. They invoke mass hysteria in grown men. We don't invoke mass hysteria. Among anyboy.
- Damn. OK. Let's make it nearly free. As-good-as-free. Free-ish. Pseudo-free. Free*.
- $2?
- $2.

So the app costs a toonie, and we promise you won't regret it for a second. If you can't afford it, email us and we'll send you a free one. If you really hate it, email us and we'll send you $3.