GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

al. , 2012). The videos are organized into eight playlists: (i) earthquakes in Italy; (ii) earthquakes worldwide; (iii) the 2009 L’Aquila, Italy, earthquake; (iv) ongoing seismic activity; (v) tsunami; (vi) earthquake prediction; (vii) seismic hazard; and (viii) a special playlist on May 11, 2011 (when a major earthquake was predicted to hit Rome). We also posted on the channel some videos reporting TV interviews about ongoing earthquake sequences, a few press-conferences held at INGV after major earthquakes (namely, the Po Plain events in 2012, see Anzidei et al. , 2012), and some particular events (as the announcement of the Scientific culture week, etc.). To date, after about three years from the start, we have published 78 videos, thanks to the collaboration of many researchers at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), with a total number of views exceeding 1,300,000. Our videos were all produced with internal resources and no specific professional skills and equipment, except for very few videos that were produced for previous initiatives. The total number of views is over 1,361,000, with several peaks of more than 20,000/day after the Tohoku, Japan, earthquake (March 2011); before the presumed prediction of a major earthquake to hit Rome on May 11, 2011; in correspondence with the 2012 Po Plain, Emilia earthquake, and after the June 21, 2013 Lunigiana earthquake. It is interesting to note that the views on May 20, 2012, when the first M5.9 earthquake stroke, were only a few thousands, whereas on May 29 we published a specific video explaining the buried faults under the Po Plain (Fig. 2) and the views raised to 72,000 in one day. This suggests that the number of views is a good indicator of satisfaction. The 8 most popular videos on INGVterremoti have been viewed more than 50,000 times, with a maximum of over 300,000. A special mention is for our top-viewed video (more than 308,000 views) that is the English version of a scientific video realized by INGV on Tsunamis, following the 2004 Sumatra event. The audience in this case is very broad, with thousands of views from USA, Japan, and other countries. The INGVterremoti youtube channel proved to be very effective at the time of the May 11, 2011, false prediction of a devastating earthquake in Rome (Crescimbeni et al. , 2012). We used the channel to explain what was going on in the weeks preceding the date, and on May 11 we performed a 24-hour release of videos from the seismic monitoring room, with updates and scientific explanations on several topics of earthquake science. Doing so, we could take advantage of the high attention of people regarding the earthquake risk, to increase awareness, at least in the people of Rome and surrounding regions (see Nostro et al. , 2012, for details). As a comparison, we show in Table 1 some statistics about the INGVterremoti and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) channels, in terms of number of views and videos. Surprisingly enough, the total number of views of our channel is higher than that of the USGS, despite the number of videos of the Survey is much larger than Fig. 2 – Some statistics on three INGVterremoti media in the period 2012-2013. Top: montly distribution of views for the blog (open in May 2012). The maximum (June 2012) was relative to the sequence in the Po Plain. Average monthly number of views are several tens to hundred thousands; B) Daily number of views for yotube; note that the first peak for the main shock of May 20 is only about 8,000, whereas the May 29 peak is over 72,000; c) rate of the INGVterremoti iPhone app (in the category Utilities in red, on all the apps in blue); note that there are several days in which our app is in the top position. 345 GNGTS 2013 S essione 2.3