Sean guides us through the mysterious world of sporting adventure outside of Formula 1. These things do exist, and Sean answers questions regarding football, darts, curling and synchronised swimming.
We are already a quarter of the way through and by the time this 60 minutes is up we'll have completed a third of the entire marathon. What will the next hour hold in store for us?
15:00 Unless I'm Very Much Mistaken... - The Wednesday night Pitlane Fanatic quiz goes live with Maverick and Jackie asking the questions, and two very special guest stars wracking their brains for the answers.
15:30 All Sports with Sean - Sean ably guides us through the murky world of sports other than Formula 1, with voicemails and questions from commenters and some insight from down under.
We're doing this for an as yet undecided charity, so if you like what you're hearing and are feeling generous, please donate. No amount too small.
Please keep in touch in the comments, we'll be trying to keep up throughout the day.
Whilst Mr C continues to stick by the somewhat flaky Official F1 App, Bassano Clapper has undertaken some investigative reporting into the other motorsport related iPhone/iPod apps. Non-Apple fans look away now, please.
Whilst Bernie doesn't seem to be embracing 21st Century technology for F1, some of us are trying to. The iPhone is a perfect conduit for F1 related info and we were given an Official F1 App this summer. This doesn't come cheap in a store of free and inexpensive timekillers but there are alternatives out there. If you're willing to experiment a little, there are a few gems - as well as a few that are not so polished. I've tried a few of the free F1 apps and these are my thoughts.
F1 2009 - Go Go Go! Lite was the first to reach my device and I was initially impressed. At my fingertips were news articles, championship standings, an F1 calendar as well as team and driver profiles. Once these were browsed I soon figured out what I most wanted from a free F1 app: convenient, up-to-date, F1 related news. This is where Go Go Go! let itself down. All the stories came from one source (gpupdate.net) and sometimes there would be many days without a single update. There's the option to upgrade to the enhanced, paid edition of this app but on this demonstration, I felt no compulsion to try the full version out, even for small price of £1.19.
Formula 1 Live Racing was next on my list. Quite similar in style to the previous app, this ad-supported offering included basic circuit profiles but had the additional bonus of a gallery of some nice, full-screen photos. I had hoped these would be updated as the calendar rolled on, but sadly this was not the case. It promised in-race updates which I never tried because it wasn't on my handset long enough. Nothing terrible here, just not particularly noteworthy.
Verdict: A firm average Formula 1 Live Racing:Download
Eurosport is an eponymous app from the sports channel that has a decent background in Motorsport. Whilst it is not as comprehensive as some of it's rivals, it is executed well. It has regular, bitesized news updates, practice, qualifying & race results as well championship standings. The live lap-by-lap updates are a handy substitute if you can't see the action first hand. However, the biggest selling point of this freebie is probably the fact that F1 is only a small portion of its abilities. It covers MotoGP, World Rally and Touring Cars as well as a handful of other non-petrolhead sports. (They really exist?) The home screen can be customised with any 4 shortcuts to your chosen sporting field as well as an "All Sports" news reel. Verdict: A big thumbs up for this one which has stayed on my handset since it landed
F1 Insider is the final, as well as, my most-clicked F1 app. Simplicity works here, large full screen displays that scroll rather than squeeze in too much info. Countdowns to all the practice and qualifying sessions for the year, as well as the races themselves. It's best redeeming feature is the news feed. This is user defined by allowing you to select (and more importantly, de-select) where you receive your news from. Nine popular F1 News sites are listed; including AUTOSPORT, GrandPrix.com and the BBC F1 pages. Being able to ignore the sites that shall not be mentioned is a nice touch. This feature is essentially a pretty RSS reader that gives you the pages of some of your favourite sites in an iPhone configured page. However, this is the app that I like the most and chose to fork out some hard earned cash (well, just over a pound) for the feature added, paid edition. For £1.19 you also get live qualifying and race updates and a nice feature that let's you tag your favourite driver and team which highlights them in the points haul (for better or worse!). This app does pretty much everything that the others do, but is presented well, has regular, plentiful news updates and for me - it passes the finish line in first place.
Verdict: Passes the finish line in first place F1 Insider:Download
That covers some of the best and worst that the AppStore has to offer, but don't forget to give us your F1 App recommendations, we're always keen to try out more.
Scott has been scouting around the comments for advice on getting into journalism, particularly sporting and motorsports. Who better to ask than Stuart Codling? Here he dispenses some invaluable advice.
“What advice can you give me if I want to start a career in motorsport journalism…?”
Well, Scott, you asked – and there’s no definitive answer, because times they are a-changin’, although there are a few principles that should hold true even in the internet age.
1) Language!
This is a communications industry, so a decent command of the lingo will be your biggest asset. Yes, I know I’m stating the bleedin’ obvious here, but you would be astounded at how many people covet a job in journalism without actually being able to operate its principal medium: English. Trust me – the evidence used to accumulate in big piles on my desk.
I’ve seen some real horrors; writing punctuated so randomly that I could only imagine the author had filled some giant pepper grinder with apostrophes and commas, then sprinkled the contents over the page as if they were putting the finishing touches to a pizza. And although there is some dark amusement to be had in reading that someone claims “attention to detail” as one of their strengths, having pitched you a feature on “Bridgestone vs Mitchell tyres”, depression soon sets in.
For all that they want to write for a living, a lot of prospective scribes don’t read enough. Perhaps it’s because they see writing as a means to an end (the end in this case being involvement in motorsport) and aren’t interested enough to find out how to do it properly. So here’s a tip: read for pleasure, and do it often. It doesn’t have to be Voltaire; Terry Pratchett will do, at a pinch. You’ll learn a lot about grammar, spelling, punctuation, pace and storytelling.
2) Know your audience
As Alex said, nobody is going to give you an F1 hardcard, a wad of plane tickets and some accommodation vouchers, and say, “Here you go; toddle off and watch some races and maybe jot something down afterwards.” As a journalist you are entering into a commercial relationship with your audience. They are your customers. You are writing for them, not for yourself. You can wind them up a bit, but don’t bore them.
So: re-read your work. Is it spelled right? Does it make sense? Is it interesting enough? What can you profitably remove, for the sake of pacing, without detracting from the flow of information? A common error – particularly among writers of motorsport history – is to utterly up-end the fact bucket over the poor reader, leaving them bewildered at the flow of information. Keeping it simple is becoming increasingly important in this era of declining attention spans.
3) Practice
Having a blog is an excellent way of improving your writing because you learn by doing – and, with any luck, you’ll get instant feedback from readers. After all, you don’t run a marathon without doing the hard miles in training first.
4) Get noticed
As Boris Johnson said, “The first duty of a columnist is to be read.” Whether you’re fulfilling a commission for a magazine or newspaper, or writing a blog entry, avoid letting it slide into blah-de-blah. In the consumer age, all people want to do is get to the end of a story and move on to the next – don’t give them an excuse to flick to the end of your piece without reading it.
Say something interesting. Make every sentence count. Play to the gallery occasionally (all successful bloggers do it).
Many people criticise my erstwhile colleague Mr Bishop, but you all know who he is and you care enough about what he says to have read his work. Even if writing a whole story about how he told Ralf Schumacher to Foxtrot Oscar was perhaps, in hindsight, not the most sensible course of action.
5) Get out from behind your keyboard
Social skills are still important. You can’t interview people on Facebook (yet). A worrying number of applicants for journalism jobs are either cripplingly shy or have poorly developed social skills. They are often very good at assembling a story based on internet research, but they founder when they have to do anything face-to-face.
If you want to differentiate your work from everyone else’s – talk to people! You may – perish the thought – learn something that doesn’t come up on the first page of Google. 6) And finally
…as someone who will remain nameless once said to me, before I arrived for a job interview, “All you have to do is turn up and not be a c—t.”
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!
