Sidepodcast

Happy Birthday Daily Thread

This time last year, I came up with an idea to try and help the flow of conversation. Instead of random comments piling up on whatever blog entry was the last to be posted, I suggested a separate thread, posted every single day for any off-topic thoughts. Mr C thought I was crazy.

Fast forward one year, and the daily thread is a Sidepodinstitution.

From the very first words, we had a good response, but it was only meant to be a trial and initially received just 240 comments. These days, we regularly see 700+ comments a day and struggle to keep on top of them all. If there is a particularly contentious issue to be discussed we can break the 1,000 barrier. Numbers aren't everything, of course (and we've gone out of our way to prevent them being so), but while we are on that subject, it looks like this weekend we will hit half a million comments since we started. Amazing. Thanks to everyone, always.

Special thanks have to go out to RG who spotted that it was the daily thread's birthday today. Way back in August, I noted the date on my calendar of Sidepodstuff, ready to mention it in today's thread. We have since moved house, and the calendar remains folded up on Mr C's desk. We would have missed the event entirely if it wasn't for RG's penchant for looking through the archives.

Still, this way the birthday can be celebrated in its own thread, and I think that is a much better way to mark the occasion. Lukeh created the above picture to honour the daily thread, and really, without each of you, it would have fizzled out a long time ago. Here's to another year of daily thread discussions of pandas, Sidepodspace, iPhone apps, and sausage rolls.

And I Would Listen to 300 More

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.

That's 300 minutes or 18,000 seconds of Formula One news delivered to your ears in the past 12 months, all from the lungs of one girl. if you listened to every show back-to-back, and they are archived should you fancy the challenge, you'd have exactly 5 hours of entertainment at your disposal.

I have to take my hat off to Christine, because when she first suggested the idea I figured it would last about a week before the colossal amount of work would bury her.

She hasn't stopped though, nor shown any hint of slowing down. Even when she was unwell post Silverstone the minutes kept on coming. On two occasions there was a requirement for multiple shows in a single day, and despite a minor slip up on my part not so long ago, I've listened to every single one of them.

This evening we'll drink a glass or two of champaaagne and say thank you to the F1 circus for providing a seemingly never-ending stream of fascinating stories, as well as one to everybody who's subscribed, listened or left comments in the past 365 days.

Thank you one and all!