Sidepodcast

I’m not sure if we’ve mentioned it enough times yet, but we might’ve been nominated for a couple of awards this week.

We mentioned back in November last year that we were after preliminary votes for Best Online Community in the 2008 Weblog Awards, because we felt the wider world needed to know just how completely wonderful the F1 community is.

Amazingly, everybody’s efforts paid off and Sidepodcast was selected as one of the top 10 finalists in that category.

It Only Takes a Minute

Voting starts today, which means we again need to ask everyone to choose their best clicking finger, and register a vote for the most distinguished Formula 1 community on the Internet.

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With the UK’s Formula One television rights now in the hands of the BBC, we were expecting ITV’s online F1 presence to disappear at the start of this year. Surprisingly ITV-F1 is still going strong.

It was pointed out to viewers at the end of the season, that the team had every intention of continuing with the site, but seeing as they no longer have any exclusive access, nor any unique video content, it’s hard to see why they would bother?

Commercial Matters

The most likely answer is the site still brings in enough advertising revenue to justify it’s costs. However, the main promotion for said site was a television program which regularly publicised it. Without any ongoing plugs, shouldn’t the number of readers begin to drop like a stone?

Make no mistake, the British commercial broadcasters online popularity was massive. Googling the phrase F1 sees ITV listed second behind only Bernie’s official homepage, and here’s how Google Trends rates them compared to Autosport and F1 Live (who sit beneath them in the search results).

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• Length: 08:47 
• Size: 102.8 MB 
• File: track19.m4v 
• Transcript: track19.pdf 
• Torrent: track19.torrent 
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Formula One is already marching headlong into the 2009 season, but before it gets there, Sidepodcast takes one final look back at the events that shaped 2008.

This isn’t your normal F1 season review, but a chance for us to catch up on some of the things that slipped through our net during the past 12 months. These are things we wanted to cover but couldn’t, either because of time constraints or video becoming available past our broadcast dates.

We look right back to winter testing, acknowledge Rubens for reaching a special milestone and hear what Jenson has to say about Formula One’s first ever night race. All this and more in the last episode of Sidepodcast TV for 2008.

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A couple of days ago, Scott W gave us a quick summary of the ING/F1 Racing Global Fan Survey results. The stats were printed in this months issue of the magazine, and as things have been a bit hectic at Sidepodcast Towers recently, I hadn’t had a chance to do any more than look at the pictures.

However, some of the things Scott pointed out are worthy of attention. It’s hardly a surprise that Hamilton picks up the highest percentage in the favourite driver category, closely followed by Raikkonen and Alonso. I am surprised at the margin, though, as many polls I’ve seen recently have put Fernando at the top of most popular driver, and he has only 12% to Lewis’ 27%.

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It’s no secret that this year the Sidepodcast community has rocketed. In 2007, we were excited to get double figures in the comments. This year, we’ve had so many amazing people leaving their thoughts and feedback, and some great ideas have sprung up because of them. If you’ve been following the comments for a while, you’ll know we like to blame Steven Roy for everything, but actually, a lot of people have offered suggestions that have added to the Sidepodcast empire. Here’s a celebration of some of them.

Don’t Quote Me

On the difficulties of manually editing html in comments:

Well, tried blockquote here, will only know if I’ve done it right after I’ve posted. I’m sure creating that quote button shouldn’t prove to be too hard. Alenyaa

After a lengthy campaign, Alenyaa finally managed to get Mr C to introduce a quote button. With one objective successfully achieved, Alenyaa began chanting for an edit button. This was also forthcoming, although took a little bit longer.

Facebook Group

In early January, Paul Gibson emailed me with some ideas for promoting the podcast. He suggested a few forums, and casually tagged at the end of the message:

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• Length: 04:13 
• Size: 39.5 MB 
• File: video25.m4v 
• Transcript: video25.pdf 
• Torrent: video25.torrent 
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After the success of last year’s F1 pantomime, the Queen (of F1 podcasting) returns for another performance of a festive Formula 1 message.

Your favourite, and not so favourite faces of 2008 make guest appearances as Christine reminisces on some of the events of the past year, whilst giving a nod to the major upheaval facing the racing world next year.

Merry Christmas everybody.

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During a recent live recording of F1 Debrief, the Sidepodcommunity managed to butcher the 12 Days of Christmas like never before.

The end result was so spectacular it really does deserve of a post of it’s own. So we’ve created a 7″ single version for your listening pleasure / pain.

The full history of how this came about, can be found on the on the Wiki, but the full rundown went something along these lines:

• Twelve years of gridwalks
• Eleven points for Rubens
• Ten Kimi fast laps
• Nine dromes from Tilke
• Eight points positions
• Seven different winners
• Six wet races
• Five Massa spins
• Four Heidfeld podiums
• Three maiden winners
• Two teams a-leavin’
• And a last corner Championship win!

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For the first time ever, this year’s Race of Champions is being broadcast online. freecaster.tv have kindly provided a streaming player which is embedded below and we’ll be following all the action from 13:50 GMT (14:50 CET) this afternoon.

Lou is to be found somewhere in the audience, as are Dan and Lady Laney, all braving Wembley Stadium in December, but you’ll find us in the relative warmth of the Live Commenting, Live… Thing.

We’ll also keep the thread up to date with the respective race winners listed with a (w), as they happen.

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A little while ago, actually a long while ago now I come to think of it, Rich sent us an email containing his personal 2008 season review in audio. At first we figured we’d slot it into F1 Debrief along with other voicemails, but it was a long review, weighing in at nearly 15 minutes, and we didn’t want to lose any of the insight. Thus the idea of an end-of-season megamix was born.

We’ve already discussed this plan on the past two shows, but I promised to go into the idea in more detail as well as put up a reminder, plus Dom’s threatened to keep hassling me until I do.

Those who’ve followed Sidepodcast for a while, may remember back at the start of the year we requested listeners to call in with their predictions for the outcome of Melbourne Grand Prix. The results were compiled into a dazzling montage that set up the season nicely. It seems only correct that we should close the year with something similar.

Therefore what we’re after is yet more contributions from your good selves. We promise this will be the last thing we ever ask of you, this year… probably. What we’d really like is for anyone and everyone to let us know what you loved, hated, supported or derided between the months January to December 2008. What made you cheer and and what made you jeer? Can you name the moments you’d watch again and again, and the ones you’d sooner forget?

12 months is a long time though, so just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a potted history of F1 in 2008 to help dust off the cobwebs:

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I’ve seen a lot of adverts for the Monaco Motorsport Business Forum recently, which makes sense as it takes place on the 10th and 11th of December. It looks like a really amazing event with all the top names not only attending but speaking as well. Mario Theissen, Nick Fry, Colin Kolles, David Richards and Max Mosley are all set to attend, with the latter one of the keynote speakers.

There’s a ton of good stuff going on, here’s an excerpt from the schedule:

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