How Much Variation is There in the Wattage of the Earth's Crust?

It certainly seems like there have been more large earthquakes in the last few months than usual. What's the standard deviation for seismic joules per month or year? I posted about this on my outdoors blog here. What I'd really like to see is an animated GIF of the USGS California earthquake map. Like this:



[Added later: Turns out they do have such a page, which can be found here. It rocks]

This one is just a 2-shot animation over 6 days. Granted 2 data points isn't great, but I'm not going to take a shot every day and make a new GIF. It looks like the quakes around Mexicali and El Centro are a) getting smaller/less numerous and b) migrating northwest, both of which match what has been happening.

So what about it, USGS? Can't you automatically make a 1-month loop animation like Unisys does with weather satellites? This might provide researchers with valuable insights. I shot an email to the webmaster at the USGS site. [And they responded, and they are doing it. Thanks guys!]