Sidepodcast

Most Prolific Contributors for 2009

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.

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.

Thursday Thoughts

Earlier today, Christine published our plans to keep people entertained during the off-season. However, we weren't expecting anyone to find themselves at a loose end already.

One or two people, it seems, are beginning to suffer from the lack of on track action, and the conversation in the comments turned to what to do on a quiet Thursday evening. Ideas were bounced around and we've settled on a plan to group-blog a specified F1 subject once a week and all publish our posts at the same time.

We don't want this to be a Sidepodcast exclusive thing, it should be decentralised and open to anyone. This post is merely the jumping off point. As yet we don't know how the specific subject will be chosen, but we do have one for today. If you're interested in joining in the fun, all you need to do is blog your thoughts on the following subject:

Who Should Be Awarded Title of 2009 F1 Team Principal of the Year?

The idea for the post was inspired by the Professional MotorSport World awards, but you don't have to take your cue from those, all you need do is describe in as many or as few words as you like, who should be awarded the title and why.

To help you on your way, here's who you have to choose from:

If you title or tag your post Thursday Thoughts, your favourite search engine should do the rest. I think the plan is that everyone will schedule blog posts to publish around 9pm GMT on a Thursday. We've missed that deadline today though, so just jump in as and when you can.

If you're joining in, by all means leave a comment here, or on another blog taking part and hopefully we can contrast and compare after the fact. If you don't have a blog, guest posts are always welcome here, and I'm sure other bloggers will extend the same invite. Just yell and we'll sort you out.

Any questions?