Sidepodcast

We had a minor issue earlier today when a comment that went into moderation caused all manner of confusion. I figured that although we’ve been through the reasoning before, it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick recap now the racing’s all gone quiet.

Remember the Name

I’m sure no-one needs reminding what Internet spam is, and why we like to keep this site free from unwanted marketing campaigns of any sort. In order to minimise exposure to spam we use a service called Akismet. It’s free, simple to work with, and generally speaking it does an excellent job of keeping the place clean and tidy.

If there’s one criticism that can be levelled at the service, its that it can be a little over-zealous when it comes to links. I’ve no idea what algorithms Akismet uses but we’ve done all we can to allow more linkage, yet it doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference.

Presumably, there must be a reason for one link to be allowed but another not, but one can only guess as to what those reasons might be.

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For the past week or so we must have answered this question (or various incarnations of it) a hundred times already. I get the impression when most people ask what we’re going to be doing with our newly acquired free time, they half expect us to say “take a holiday”, or something equally relaxing.

Clearly they haven’t met Christine.

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It must be the season for award ceremonies. Following swiftly on from the Blubrry podcast awards that we failed to get nominated for, come the 2008 Weblog Awards.

Again these are at the preliminary stage of looking for nominations, and Bassano Clapper has kindly named Sidepodcast in the category Best Online Community. To us this is the best class any blog could ever hope to be nominated in, and it’s not something this site could’ve been considered for this time last year.

We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating again - the F1 community never ceases to amaze us. Each and every day amazing people do cool stuff like commenting here, emailing Christine, contributing to the Facebook group, adding stuff to Drop.io and getting wildly creative on the Wiki. Let’s not forget the audio too, with regular voicemails, phone calls and guests on the panel. Quite honestly we’ve no idea how anyone finds the time for all the fantastic contributions.

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Quite honestly, you couldn’t have scripted it better.

I’m not sure how it happened, maybe the stars are all aligned or something, but Tuesday 7th October, marks the one year anniversary of F1 Minute, which by some freaky coincidence also happens to tie in with the 300th episode of the show.

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It’s seems like all I ever do these days is promote the work Christine is doing on other websites.

Today’s no exception, because her first guest post is now publicly available on vee8. The subject this time is Mark Webber’s new BBC column.

For those not aware, this site is a spin off from frequent commenter doctorvee’s personal blog. The doc has long been a serial F1 blogger but realised recently that he created enough F1 content to stand up on it’s own and vee8 is the result.

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There have been plenty of battles at Sidepodcast Towers, from who is in charge of updating the RSS feeds, to whether things fall under good week or bad week. The most recent argument, however, is just how much Champ Car news is allowed on an F1 podcast.

I am not quite ready to let Mr Montagny go just yet, and if that means sacrificing some minutes on the show to talking about how great he is and how he deserves a drive, I’m all for it. You can imagine that my co-host is not so keen.

Deep down, I know he’s right, because our first love is Formula 1 and we don’t want to dilute Sidepodcast with other series - even if they do have sidepods. We still have so much to say on our chosen subject, it would be foolish to add yet more news to the mix.

So, the compromise: iheartfranck.com

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You may have heard us mention it on the show, and you may have noticed us littering comments around the web yesterday, but what does it all mean? Must Comment Monday is back!

What is it?

You see these things all the time: Photo Friday, Talky Tuesday, Question Saturday. Some of them are genuinely cool things to take part in , and some of them are just a way for people to come up with ideas to fill their blogs. Sidepodcast doesn’t like to miss out on anything, so we’re resurrecting one of the best: Must Comment Monday.

This is something that I came up with, back in the days before Sidepodcast - those long, long hours spent thinking about things other than Formula 1. What was that like? With the demise of my personal blog, Must Comment Monday went out the window as well. But it was a good idea, and that’s why we’re bringing it back.

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A couple of weeks ago, with almost uncanny timing, we received some unprecedented feedback from two separate sources regarding our debut unto the podcasting world. At the time we were busying ourselves with all sorts of projects, but we took the information on board and referred to it when figuring out our 2008 plans.

Now that we’ve had a moment to catch breath, it seems only courteous to respond.

BlogF1

First up was a post entitled ‘F1 Podcasts: Do You Listen To Them?‘ from BlogF1, which detailed Ollie’s thoughts about Formula 1 podcasting this year. He raised a couple of points worth looking into further, most of which relate to how bad we are at promoting some of our own features.

For example, Ollie suggests:

What would be awesome - if possible - is if you could split a podcast up into chapters, much like on a DVD, and the chapter list with short description be included in a universal format somewhere within the audio file that makes up a podcast.

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