This week as the off-season comes to a close, it's the final Thursday Thoughts for awhile. Unusually we have a question in front of us that both Christine and I can answer, but in different ways. So this is my take.
Maverick has put bloggers in the spotlight by simply asking, why do you blog?
This is a bit of a tricky subject to approach, because originally Sidepodcast was about audio and about video. The written word was, and still to a degree is, a secondary consideration. Two scenarios have driven the direction of site in a more textual direction - it is expensive to create two-way conversation using other media, and when time is of the essence, text delivery is faster and more convenient.
The latter is especially true when working on projects on a part-time basis.
Mr. C and Me
I only write blog posts for Sidepodcast and very occasionally for F1 Minute. You might consider me the lesser productive half of the team. I can't remember how I ended up getting roped into writing (I swear I only agreed to a speaking part), so a trip back into the archives is in order.
59 words made up my first post back in 2007, and it wasn't F1 related. A further month passed before I had a go at Ferrari. Following the archive trail through '08 and '09 it's easy to conclude that I primarily blog to promote things.
Catching right up to date, I can see that my text output has increased as more things have needed selling or explaining. My typing speed has not.
I'm confident that if project Sidepodcast ended tomorrow, my writing would cease along with it. There just isn't a burning desire within me to type anything.
All for F1
A year or so ago, we had a problem with people suggesting that we were F1 journalists, or reporters, or some such thing that we weren't comfortable with. For me, Sidepodcast was never a stepping stone into the Formula 1 circus, it wasn't a way to showcase any skills to the wider world, it was simply a vehicle with which Christine and I could work together. To that end it's work incredibly well, despite all the writing I've had to do.
This final Thursday Thoughts question closes the 2009-2010 off-season for me, and I've appreciated reading every question and all the posts that have spilled forth from them. I may not give so much back as some, but I love being a part of the F1 community.
For the final Thursday Thoughts, Maverick has posed a question not directly related to F1, but an interesting one. Mr C and I are both answering, so make sure you also read his answer here. The question itself: why do you blog?
It's a tough one for me. I've been blogging for so long and in so many different ways that I often forget why I do it, aside from just enjoying the process. I love to blog. I like writing, I like forming an idea into something a bit bigger, I like sharing things with other people. I love getting comments, but that is a bonus.
Once, a long time ago, an Aunt of mine stumbled across my personal blog, and when talking to me about it, said it was just like a scrapbook she used to keep. She said it was exactly what she would have done if the technology had been around when she was a kid. That's mostly how I see my blog. One giant scrapbook - a way of highlighting and saving awesome things, taking part in and recording conversations with fabulous folks. Looking back through the archives can be a pleasure or a pain, but is always a fascinating thing to do.
I have quite a lot of archives to look through, with many, many blogs to my name. Currently, I have these blogs ongoing:
Other blogs I have started and stopped: Daily Tennis Blog, Daily F1 Blog, Daily Hollyoaks Blog, The BBC Blog.
It might be an addiction.
In terms of Sidepodcast, I feel as though the blog is for something that won't work very well in audio, and is for things that need sharing and archiving. We've often bemoaned the fact that audio isn't the easiest thing to look back on, and producing transcripts is very important, if time consuming. When something needs bookmarking in a more tangible form, a blog entry might be it.
F1 is one of the hardest subjects I've tackled, and even though I've learnt enormous amounts since I first started the Daily F1 Blog, I still feel clueless 99% of the time. Writing, and discussing the subject with our lovely community helps me keep on learning.
I didn't mention Janna's birthday in the daily post today, because I knew we had a guest post stored up and waiting. Here, Janna tells us what she would like for her birthday.
It’s my birthday today and I keep being asked what I would like or what I’m getting. I like birthdays and I like being given presents but, even more than that, I like giving to someone else something I know they will really enjoy.
With that in mind, and because Christine & Mr C are too nice to ask themselves, I wanted to remind everyone about supporting Sidepodcast.
This site, and all of the podcasts, are the product of Mr & Mrs C’s “spare” time and dedication. They do this because they want to but it takes up a lot of their time and a considerable amount of money. They provide us with an amazing amount of F1 news and a site where we can share our views on all things F1 (and not) supported by their hard work.
You can support Sidepodcast from the home page. You can donate any amount for as a UK supermarket says “Every little helps”.
So, if you love listening to the podcasts, if you enjoy lurking in the comments to catch up on the latest panda news, or if you comment constantly, Sidepodcast supports us all and we need to give something back.
Finally, I started lurking on Sidepodcast around this time last year and de-lurked in July. I want to thank Christine, Mr C and all of the commenters for making the last year much better than it would otherwise have been. If you are lurking, they’re a really welcoming bunch, come and say hello, and don’t forget to donate.
So '09 came and went, and during the year we had a couple of things to say on a subject or two. We weren't the only ones though, some 444,749 individual comments were posted on Sidepodcast between 1 January and 31 December 2009.
We may be biased, but we truly believe the Sidepodcast community is the very best F1 community on the internet. I'm banned from thanking anyone else, but just as we did last year, we thought we'd take a look and see which individuals contributed the most to the conversation in the past 12 months.
Top Sidepodcast Commenters of 2009
Pos
Name
Total
1
Steven Roy
32889
2
Bassano Clapper
23638
3
Gavin Brown (RubberGoat)
22927
4
Journeyer
22681
5
Lukeh
20482
6
Nick
20128
7
lou
19686
8
Alex Andronov
18525
9
Jon Waldock
18211
10
Amy
16298
Last year, Lou topped the chart with 10,064 comments. She nearly doubled that figure this year, but still came close to falling out of the top ten. Steven's whopping 32,889 comments sees him way out in front as Sidepodcast's Commenting King of 2009. Mr. Roy we owe you a drink or three.
Over 800 individuals left comments this past year, up considerably from the 200 or so in 2008. We welcome everybody with open arms, but we do have to work on keeping hold of new commenters, as more than 300 people left a single response, never to return again.
As for ourselves, Christine didn't quite make the top ten this year leaving just 14,641 comments, while I somehow managed to hit the return key 44,247 times. I think that might count as an addiction.
We should point out that while we've done our best to validate the figures, all counts were aggregated by email address and if you changed yours during the year, your total may not accurately reflect your true effort. We've also done the obvious things like remove spam and trackbacks to ensure only user generated data is totalled.
Sidepodcast passed the 500,000 published comments mark this year, and with that came numerous scalability challenges that we're still working to overcome. We're hoping that people will continue to contribute to the F1 conversation in 2010, and that those lurkers who read but have yet to join in the fun do so soon.
We look forward to reading your next half a million thoughts.
All Posts in The Series: Most Prolific Contributors
Following on from our never-ending coverage of the Sidepodscience meetup, Gavin Brown takes a look at the experience from another angle.
Ah… the now legendary Sidepodtour to the McLaren exhibit at the Science Museum. But, I hear you ask, there has already been an article, a discussion and two podcasts about the exhibit, so why have a guest post on it?
Well, that is an excellent question. Clearly, there is no point in repeating what has already been said – but after discussing the matter with Mr. C. in the pub, he suggested I write a guest post on the exhibit. The reason – the fact that I had been to the Ferrari Store on Regent Street the day before and I was comparing the two. So here we are then!
Firstly, a little background, in case you missed it the first time around. On Wednesday 15th April, we had a meet up at the Science Museum in London because McLaren were sponsoring an exhibit called “Fast Forward: 20 ways F1 is changing our world”. I arrived at the Museum at 12:30pm and saw a massive queue extending as far as Cromwell Road. Luckily, as I made my way towards the entrance on Exhibition road, the queue seemed to be for the Natural History Museum!
So I queued up, and luckily it only took me about 10 minutes to get inside. Unfortunately when I asked about the wheel of the Airbus I was told that it had been removed “but your friend was just asking about it” – so I looked around, found an upside down McLaren and underneath it was Bootneck, Lou, Lukeh and Chris. We were told to move along as we were blocking some dude who was selling programmes, so we moved up the stairs to near where the exhibit was. This seemed like the only sensible place to meet up, but alas we had to deal with the most jumpy and irritable security guard I had ever seen – he was supposed to be in charge of some very expensive technology yet was unable to deal with 20 F1 fans standing still on a staircase!
Anyway, once we had all arrived (Christine and Mr. C. were not the last ones to arrive, either!) we decided to check out the exhibit. As mentioned many times before, it was not very good – the exhibits had very tenuous links to F1, such as gumboots, fishing line inspired by tyres, stairs and a table made from carbon fibre plus a weird looking sleeping pod? Where were F1’s real technology successes, such as the Turbo, radial tyres, pneumatic valves, safety and fireproofing equipment, semi-automatic gearboxes, active suspension and electronic stability control? If I wanted to tell people how F1 is relevant to the real world, I would start with these things – not fishing wire and carbon fibre stairs!
None of this was helped by an alarm system that seemed to want to annoy you by piercing your eardrums when you got within two feet of the glass cabinets – even though I saw a kid slap one of the cabinets as he walked past and nothing happened! This seemed to make Mr. Jumpy McGrumpy the Security Guard just a little more agitated – at one point he threatened to evict Mr. C. just for getting too close to take a photo! Add that to the fact that the exhibit was located in a dark, hot and stuffy cupboard and it was fair to say that we all walked away less than impressed.
All of this got me thinking, because the day before I had visited the Ferrari store on Regent Street and to be honest, I had a much better experience in there. The Ferrari Store pulls you in off the street enticing you with lovely window displays of steering wheels and as soon as you walk in the door, a lovely F2004 that you can actually touch! I could not believe that you could sit next to it and take a photo.
At the Science Museum, there was a McLaren upside down on the roof and a crashed one near a café, but you were not supposed to take pictures of it.
As you walk around this lovely store your senses are assaulted by the colour red and prancing horses abound everywhere … you could buy everything possible that was associated with Ferrari, even down to a nosecone from a GTO, and expired engine bits. At the Science Museum, although McLaren sponsored the exhibit, not a single mention of the team, or any of its sponsors, was to be found there.
Frankly, the Ferrari store was a much better experience and it got me much more excited and passionate about F1 than the McLaren exhibit did. Even my wife enjoyed the Ferrari store and she does not care for F1, but I think that the McLaren exhibit would have bored people like her to tears.
Sadly, this was a real lost opportunity to win over potential fans of the sport and make a few bob from selling F1 related merchandise - this is not the way to try and promote F1 and I think whoever organised it really got it wrong, unfortunately. Both were free, yet the Ferrari one felt like a proper Formula 1 experience and the McLaren exhibit felt like a trade show for obscure machinery that nobody quite knows what to do with. As Joe Saward says quite often, F1 does a lot of good stuff and needs to promote itself better. I would hope that in future, when I go to see an F1 exhibit that it is much better than the McLaren one that we saw at the Science Museum.
The Sidepodcast blog runs atop the content management system, WordPress. When we first set up the site in 2006, WordPress allowed us to get up and running very quickly with a minimum of fuss, but it hasn't done a very good job of keeping up with our needs. Specifically the platform has fallen behind when it comes to the area of commenting, and sharing pretty much anything that isn't text is a problem.
Know Your Limits
The two of us realised there were limitations about 12 months ago, but it wasn't until last May that we discovered a service called Drop.io, which amongst other things, offers a very simple way to share multimedia files. The first mention of said service, came way back in May 2008, and we've been making good use of it ever since.
If you're a Sidepodcast regular, you've probably noticed the changes we've been introducing to real-time commenting of late, and over the past few days, the last major piece of the puzzle was introduced. It's now possible to share images with other Sidepodcast readers directly from the comment box.
Thanks to the wonders of the Drop.io API, and in conjunction with the uber-fast caching services provided by Google App Engine, we think we've found the best means of sharing images with the minimum of hassle.
If you've never tried it before, jump on over to real-time commenting, reply to a comment, select the share image option and upload one of your own images from your desktop.
Because embedding a large number of images into a page tends to slow mobile browsing to a crawl, any upload will return a link to the original file, but selecting the link will display the image full screen within the real-time environment. Hopefully this offers the best compromise of speed and flexibility for all users on every platform, while enabling better and more interactive commenting.
We're Not Done Yet
It's worth pointing out that all of the above is still effectively in beta, and it's not yet perfect. We've also restricted uploads to be solely of the image variety, but in future that will likely expand to encompass audio, video, spreadsheets and more. There are also limitations related to mobile uploads which we plan to tackle in the future.
Big thanks go to the people at Drop.io for providing such a fantastic platform to build upon, as well as to everyone in the comments for providing brilliant feedback and direction. We have more plans in the pipeline to improve commenting further in the future, and we'll keep you posted as they come closer to reality.
Yesterday was bit a exciting, all things considered. Early on in the day Scott noticed Christine's recent diary entry was featured on YouTube's homepage, and then we finally had some actual Honda news to content with. Ross Brawn broke the silence by clarifying some key points about the teams future and confirmed initial talks have begun with Ferrari.
Key discussion points for today include:
With a decision on Donington Park's planning permission due tomorrow, more news is trickling in as the local media outlets cover the story. Apparently 18 letters had been submitted to the council, raising issues such as increased traffic levels, parking and noise problems, but organisers remain confident plans will be approved.
Mark Superman Webber appears to be confident he'll be fit in time for February testing. We were taking bets on the red bullog earlier this week on whether he'd recover faster than Schumi did in '99. Predictably, I'm saying he will.
We could do with a couple more subscribers to the brand new Sidepodcast last.fm group, even though we don't really know what it's for yet. If you enjoy signing up for stuff, then this is a prime opportunity we're presenting you with here.
Finally, as if is you could forget, the F1 community needs your votes:
Don't forget you can vote once every 24 hours and Sidepodcast is nominated in two categories.
Given a lack of anything important happening in Formula 1 at the moment, we're doing a pretty good job of filling in the downtime. On the off chance that you don't manage to read every single comment posted on the site, here's a quick introduction to two upcoming events that you might've missed.
Batracing
Not, as the name might imply, anything to do with chasing villains in the Batmobile. Batracer is in fact an online F1 management game, where you have to guide a driver through a full season of Formula 1.
We were a little dubious about agreeing to this in the first place, but Mr. Woodwiss can be a persistent chap, going so far as to writing a most helpful introductory guide for newbies like us. After a hour or two we were sold on the idea.
If you've never played before but can spare a couple of minutes a day, it costs nothing to join, just visit the Sidepodcast league that Scott's set up already, and enter the rather predicable password sidepodcast. I think we're looking for just two more drivers now, and I'm particularly keen to find someone who's never played before, if only so I don't come last.
Kart Racing
Item number two on our events list is the karting competition Alianora's organised for next Saturday. The plan is for a bunch of us to decamp to the Teamworks Birmingham karting track, following a visit to Autosport International at the NEC.
I'm not particularly good at karting, they tend to be a bit on the small side for me, so if you fancy beating me on four wheels rather than online, the details can be found on Alia's wiki page. In addition Christine will be live commenting the whole of practice and the race from the bar, so even if you can't make it, you might want to check back here next Saturday to see what's going down.
That's a quick insight into the things that are occupying us at the moment. If you have any other suggestions as to how to fill time between races, do let us know in the comments, you just never know where it'll lead.
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.
A quick reminder then. The idea is a simple one - if a blogger publishes a post on a Monday and you happen to read it, then you must leave a comment. Ideally it would be the kind of input that furthers the conversation in some way, but honestly anything that turns someone from a passive reader into a contributor is good in our book.
The theory is, feedback encourages bloggers to write more, which in turn increases the likelyhood of better and more informed conversation. If you missed this the first time round, or need a refresh of the rules (all two of them), we have a page just for you.
This is meant to be a bit of fun to occupy persons during the "quiet period" and our goal is to try and keep this up until the racing gets going again in Australia.
It would be most excellent if anyone is considering taking part. Let us know, and we'll begin this coming Monday. Also, feel free to promote your blog in the comments if you're planning on posting and we'll promise to stop by and say "hullo".
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.
A quick look at the comment totals for the past 30 days shows five people with over 1,000 each and the top person offering up a stunning 2,000 individual comments... in four weeks. That is an unbelievable statistic.
We're not just talking quantity either. The insight provided daily is second to none, often completely changes our outlook on any given situation and frequently has the two of us in stitches. During the past 12 months we've maybe had to moderate no more than a dozen comments and I challenge anyone anywhere to find a nicer or more hard-working group of people on the Internet.
In our eyes of course, this already is the best online community, but apparently for the wider world to understand and appreciate it, we might need to do some button pushing (steady Lou). All that's required is to click through to the awards site and hit the green 'plus' icon beneath the Sidepodcast nomination.
Apparently, the number of nominations received is irrelevant, but one has to ask why have a rating button at all? And as Steven pointed out the other day, an online community that only gets one nomination must be guaranteed to lose.
At time of writing, the total stands at 10 votes. If you have a minute to spare, we'd like to see that go even higher. Your F1 community needs you!
