Sidepodcast

Thursday Thoughts - Your Blog

Welcome to the last Thursday Thoughts for the time being. We've been answering and posing questions for the off-season, and it's been an amazing ride, covering vast subjects from best team principals, to the economics of local governments. The best thing about Thursday Thoughts, though, has been the excellent participation amongst bloggers - from the volunteers to host the question each week - to everyone putting fingers to keyboard to come up with some answers.

This final question comes from Maverick of Viva F1, who thought it would be fitting for the last one. Rather than something specific to F1, we want to look at blogging. Maverick's question:

Which blog article or articles have you written that you were most pleased with writing and why?

The topic came out of a conversation about the reasons for blogging, why you do it and what you get out of it. These are also up for discussion, if you want to focus on the whys and wherefores, rather than specific posts.

We'll post our answer here later today, and if you take up the question, please link to your posts here as well.

That just leaves me time to thank everyone who's hosted a question:

• Maverick
• Pat
• Gavin
• RG
• Turkey Machine
• Dylan
• Journeyer
• Adie
• Dan Brunell
• Jackie

We could never have come up with such a diverse range of conversations by ourselves, and I can't wait for the winter to come round so we can do it all again.

It's Hard to Get by Just Upon a Smile

I've had quite a bad day over here at Sidepodcast Towers, and in order to release some of the tension, I'm gonna pick on a couple of news stories that have wound me up today.

More Stories From Nothing

As ever, Autosport has managed to extract as much as possible out of a single situation to make as many stories as possible. In this case, Hamilton's reaction to questions about whether he's expecting a bad reception in Spain.

Hamilton: "No."

Autosport: "That's all we needed to know."

Wonders Will Never Cease

Danica Patrick won a race last weekend, which is brilliant for her, for motorsport, for womankind, etc, etc. But apparently, the BBC think she may not be worthy of a namecheck.

Woman.

A woman did it.

I'm assuming they thought writing Patrick would lead readers to think it was a man, and they'd be less inclined to click. So they chose woman.

I Thought of it First

Flavio is getting married between the Canadian and the French GP.

I just want it noted that Sidepodcast was planning their wedding between races before Briatore had even thought about it.

Thanks for listening. I feel better now.

Mountains and Molehills

You can imagine that researching F1 Minute means I read a lot more news now than I used to. In fact, quite often, I'll be talking to the man and he won't know what I'm on about. Did you read that right? I'm ahead of him. Brilliant.

Anyway, I was browsing Autosport.com today, and saw the return of their traditional posts headed up Preview Quotes: #Team Name#. You know what that means, don't you? The season is truly coming back. I was excited, I may have even whooped out loud. But then I saw that Autosport didn't just have one post about the Previews. They'd managed to stretch it out to three posts.

I know this isn't unusual for Autosport, we've certainly picked up on it in the past. I know a lot of other bloggers find their site very frustrating. I've been giving them the benefit of the doubt, but it's starting to get a little bit ridiculous.

Talk about milking something for all it's worth - three stories out of a few questions on a single press release? We get these press releases sent to us too, and other than re-printing them, I can't think of a single story that's worth a whole page of it's own.