At the end of last year we listed some statistics relating to this site, and said we'd take another look in a year's time. We still plan to do that, but top chap SteveInTheUK has done such a fine job of collating information relating to one of those stats, we just had to give him a plug.

The number in question is the comment count, and at the end of 2007 after pretty much exactly a year of podcasting, that number stood at 1,548 comments. Since then Steve has been keeping track of how the figures have moved as the year has progressed. The results have been entered into a Google spreadsheet, the output of which looks something like this:

If you're statistically inclined, it's worth spending some time digging into the data, but the two colours of most interest in the picture above are the Total Comments (in blue) and the Total Comments from Live Sessions (in grey). In essence they show just what an impact live commenting has had on the overall count as well as highlighting just how much discussion the last two races have generated.

Steve's actually keeping the data up-to-date in order to monitor how good Media Temple are at scaling hosted web solutions, and you have to say, on this evidence they do a damn fine job of it.

We'll have to check back on the figures come the end of the year, but in the meantime many thanks go to Steve for the work he's put into this, and as ever much appreciation goes out to the F1 community who provide such a tour de force of insight and opinion on a daily basis.