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As a journalist and data fiend, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but after the earthquake rattled me out of bed at 4:08 a.m. Saturday, I had no idea where to confirm it, or report it.

But others around here did. Minutes after the 3.0 quake hit, people were online at the United States Geological Survey Earthquake Center Website answering the survey under the heading "Did you feel it?" By 5 a.m., a hundred people had made reports.

By Monday afternoon, the number was over 500.

I got curious about where those reports were coming from, and whether they reflected where the quake's epicenter was. Despite the skews in the data from things like available Internet access to make a report to simply knowing you can make a report, the frequency of reports is in fact highest near the epicenter.

I put it all together on an interactive map you can check out now in the DataSphere, using the data summary for the reports that's available on the USGS site. Lots of good data there, by the way, including the latitude and longitude of the quake's epicenter (which put it in a suburban back yard just off Garst Mill Road in Roanoke County) and the quake's depth beneath the earth's surface (about 8 miles).

I wish I'd had all this about 4:10 a.m. Saturday. Instead, like most of us who felt it, I was left to sit in my bed and wonder what the hell that was that just happened. My wife and I ran through the exact same list of possibilities that many others have recounted -- tree fell on the house, car hit the house, gas leak and explosion. We didn't figure out that it wasn't just our house that shook until my wife overheard someone on the street in front of our house asking the question people would be asking all day: "Did you feel it?"

No one was hurt and no property was damaged, so it all amounted to was a great communal experience predicated on answering that question.

Happily for a data nerd like me, hundreds of you chose to answer that question online, too.

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