Sidepodcast

2009 Character Cup

Here at Sidepodcast Towers, we're both big fans of the television show LOST, and keep on eye on this blog, in particular. Although the season has just started again, during the dark winter months, the site runs a Character Cup where readers vote on head-to-head match ups until an outright winner is found.

Now, we're not adverse to borrowing an idea or two, and thought a Character Cup sounded like a great one. Whilst Formula One exists in the real world, there are plenty of "characters" around (excluding Fisichella, of course). What better way to pass some time on the blog by running our own competition?

Let's take a look at the contenders, the Class of 2009 courtesy of Animoto.

Starting very soon, we'll be putting up the first battle, pitting two drivers against each other. We trialled a polling system earlier in the year, to select the new header for the site. Now we're really going to put it through it's paces. It's up to you which way you vote and why, it may be that you think one will do better this year, maybe you just prefer someone over another or possibly you'll simply close your eyes and pick at random. We don't mind but you have 24 hours to vote on each pairing and the whole process should take about two weeks.

Just a couple of notes, before it starts. Honda are excluded at the moment, for obvious reasons, and unfortunately for Buemi, he also misses out. With no team mate selected as yet, Toro Rosso don't make a complete package and therefore aren't included. It's also to do with making the numbers add up, but let's keep that between ourselves.

Another of them Award Things

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!