The last week there has been a handful of M2+ quakes in and near the Santa Monica Mountains. This, I think, is not uncommon, but I don't think has occured like this in this area for a while. Although I (many people?) see patterns where they are not there, and my work interpreting seismic reflection data may train me to see patterns (hopefully where they are there), it does seem like this seismicity is not so random...something is jittering around there (something is triggering these quakes??). This is just a casual observation, deserving of no more credibility than that of anyone else on this page who has been observing the seismicity maps for a long time.

While I have no reason to expect anything bigger this time, there was a bit of a swarm of 3s and 4s in Santa Monica Bay area a week before Northridge. But, the energy release of that swarm is probably 100 or 1000 times greater than what we have now.
Chris