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!