GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

ours. A possible explanation is that in Italy in the past few years (particularly after the 2009 L’Aquila sequence) the search for information on earthquakes is very strong, whereas in the US people’s awareness of earthquakes and in general of natural hazards is higher. However, we must consider that US have not been hit by a strong damaging earthquake in the last few years. Tab. 1 – A numerical comparison between INGVterremoti and USGS youtube channels (numbers are relative to September 29, 2013. Start date Videos > 50,000 Followers Most viewed INGVterremoti 2010 8 1,371,420 308,672 USGS (all) 2009 6 1,228,923 228,923 One thing we have learned is that, due to the strong variability in the number of accesses (generally after strong earthquakes), it is important to exploit these moments when the attention is high to disseminate relevant information on seismic hazard and to increase people awareness. Future trends include the improvement of technical aspects of our videos, and to develop contents more focused on risk mitigation issues. We will also try to broaden our audience and to increase contents in English language. App INGVterremoti for iPhone. The INGVterremoti application for iPhone has been developed starting in 2009 after the L’Aquila seismic sequence. It is available in the Apple App Store since 2010. In 2012 the 2.0 version has been distributed. We are presently working on the 3.0 version for Iphone and a new version for Android. The application is based on the data available in the INGV ISIDE database (http://iside.rm.ingv.it ) and its primary function is to give the list and the basic information on the Italian seismicity. Starting from a cumulative list of the last events recorded by the national seismic network several parameters and a Google map for each single earthquake can be visualized. The application gives also detailed information on the seismic hazard at a national and regional scale as well as specific focus on the basics of seismic hazard assessment and related legislation. The connection with ISIDE database allows for search of the Italian catalogue of seismicity back to 2005. Finally, a specific seismological glossary is available for the user. Though developed with limited resources, the application has been remarkably successful reaching several times the absolute top ten in free applications downloads of the Italian store and cumulating a total of 778.000 downloads since 2010 (Fig. 2). The INGVterremoti blog. We opened the blog soon after the Po Plain sequence, started on May 20, 2012. After a few days needed for setting up the blog (http://ingvterremoti.wordpress . com). The blog was opened to the public on May 29, just after the M5.8 shock stroke the western sector of the fault zone, causing several casualties and huge damages (Anzidei et al. , 2012). As described in Pignone et al. (2012), during a seismic sequence it is very important for people shaken by the earthquakes to have continuous and timely information on the ongoing seismicity. In the first two months of the blog’s life, we released tens of updates and in-depth scientific explanations on the earthquake sequence. Through the collaboration of Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) researchers and technicians, we published more than 80 posts about the sequence, to describe activities performed during the emergency, and the first scientific results obtained from data analyses. The response of the public was enthusiastic, at least quantitatively, reaching its maximum on June 3, 2012, when a strong aftershock (M5.1) was strongly felt in the region. We recorded more than 850,000 views on that particular day, and had more than six million contacts (6,403,843) in the first two months of activity (May 29 to July 29). We are now working to assess the degree of acceptance of the blog in a comprehensive way. At the moment we can only report our positive feeling, based on the favourable comments and increasing contacts we had in the last year, that were very encouraging. In Fig. 3 we show a snapshot of the blog, with one popular video at the time of the Po Plain earthquakes. 346 GNGTS 2013 S essione 2.3