Some Numbers So Far
At the end of last year we listed some statistics relating to this site, and said we’d take another look in a year’s time. We still plan to do that, but top chap SteveInTheUK has done such a fine job of collating information relating to one of those stats, we just had to give him a plug.
The number in question is the comment count, and at the end of 2007 after pretty much exactly a year of podcasting, that number stood at 1,548 comments. Since then Steve has been keeping track of how the figures have moved as the year has progressed. The results have been entered into a Google spreadsheet, the output of which looks something like this:
If you’re statistically inclined, it’s worth spending some time digging into the data, but the two colours of most interest in the picture above are the Total Comments (in blue) and the Total Comments from Live Sessions (in grey). In essence they show just what an impact live commenting has had on the overall count as well as highlighting just how much discussion the last two races have generated.
Steve’s actually keeping the data up-to-date in order to monitor how good Media Temple are at scaling hosted web solutions, and you have to say, on this evidence they do a damn fine job of it.
We’ll have to check back on the figures come the end of the year, but in the meantime many thanks go to Steve for the work he’s put into this, and as ever much appreciation goes out to the F1 community who provide such a tour de force of insight and opinion on a daily basis.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 amAlianora La Canta said:
It’s surprising how closely the Live Comments and the total posts pair with one another. lou has a lot to answer for
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 amAlex Andronov said:
Another interesting stat is that the top 5 commenters in the last month have made 5,778 commments which is nigh on half of the comments!
I guess Me and Christine are excluded from that count though.
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:02 pmme said:
that’s amazing. i guess there’s a lot of controversy in f1 at the moment.
i should’ve said also, the data for the final month is probably out of date, i think we’ve done another live streaming session since then, so presumably the figure’s even higher than currently indicated.
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:11 pmAlex Andronov said:
That and that Scott and I can’t shut up
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:11 pmSteven Roy said:
The interesting number that I picked up on is that there have been a few live comment sessions that have attracted as many comments as sidepodcast attracted in total to end 2007.
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:47 pmme said:
jeeez.
i think we need to award “official” mugs to the most prolific contributors at the end of the year.
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:11 pmFlibster said:
Official mugs?
Are the unofficial ones paper cups with sidepodcast written on in biro?
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:20 pmme said:
depends on how bad the credit crunch gets. so most likely, yes.
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:01 pmR.G (Hate something, change something, make something betterrrrr) said:
What about ones for best comments. Or best plugging.
Gooooooo sidepodcast!!
As for the stats, impressie work Steve. You can see at the end, me was getting emotional at thanking everyone, you could sense it if it were a podcast
I think I’ve started waffling, so I’ll stop
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:19 pmme said:
hahaha. do i do that? sorry, my bad.
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:51 pmR.G (Hate something, change something, make something betterrrrr) said:
It was like an oscar speech
‘and as ever much appreciation goes out to the F1 community who :sniff: provide such a tour de force of :sniff: insight and opinion on a :sniff: daily basis. I love you all :cry:’
along those lines
September 25th, 2008 at 8:24 pmSteveintheUK said:
WOW, Thanks ‘me’, when you asked if you could post a link to that spreadsheet I didn’t think you would be writing such a great post about it.
Oh and sorry this ‘Thank You’ is a bit late but was on here to update the spreadsheet before this race weekend and come across it this post.
It’s going to be close as to whether we can break the 20,000 comment barrier for this month but with such an interesting looking race weekend still to go we should, ie ‘Top 5 commenters’ should just be able to do it.
We/Sidpodcast currently have 12,597 comments for September, but with the now famous Parade Lap to help add to the total, there was nearly 5,600 comments over the last race weekend. So if Lou pulls out all the stops to regain her title as ‘No. One Commenter’ we should get to at least break the 19,000 mark.
and now for the Oscar Speech part…
Many thanks goes to everybody that has posted comments on Sidepodcast in helping to prove to my potential clients that Wordpress on MediaTemple could, probably, cope with a site going major front page on Digg by posting 106 comments in the first 10 minutes of the last race. Any system that can cope with a comment every 5.66 seconds has got to be pretty solid.
So many thanks also goes to ‘me’ for writing such a stable ‘Live Commenting Live… Thing‘ with out which it wouldn’t have been possible for people to have made many of the fantastic comments with which to test the system.
Thanks also have to go to the gorgeous and very talented Christine for coming back every race even though she knows she will be picked on for her driver line up.
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OK, so that wasn’t as good an Oscar Speech, or should that be Emmys?, as the original one by ‘me’ but hope both Christine and ‘me’ know how much we all appreciate all the hard work that they both put in to running Sidepodcast and for helping make F1 weekends that much more enjoyable.
Hopefully I see you all in the ‘Live Commenting Live… Thing‘ from tomorrow.
All the Best
SteveintheUK