Sidepodcast

Earlier on in the year you may recall the introduction of Must Comment Monday. The premise was simple - further the F1 conversation by means of the humble comment.

As it happened, not long after the concept debuted, Formula 1 went a bit mental and we had a tough time keeping up with comments on this site, let alone anywhere else. However, now that the season is over, and given that this year there’s no long-running espionage scandal bubbling away in the background, it feels like a quiet enough period to take a second stab at it.

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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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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.

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F1 Racing magazine has come in for a lot of stick in recent months, exacerbated by the personal attack on Ralf Schumacher by The Bish. It was branded outdated and unnecessary, and generally written off by a lot of previously dedicated readers.

Personally, I’m a fan of the magazine. There are few periodicals I get these days that can hold my attention, and considering how much F1 already consumes my world, I’m impressed that F1 Racing can get me to read it from cover to cover. (Back to front, incidentally, always.)

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