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Archive: age

Has Barrichello hit the ceiling?

30 March 2011 09:52

Categories: *, Formula 1

It can’t be easy being the oldest driver in F1. Just ask the BBC’s commentators.

I remember Martin Brundle once describing how the fact that he was the oldest driver in the 1996 season caught up with him and began to define him as a driver. Despite having a reasonable season, by the following year he had switched to his new career in broadcasting.

Meanwhile, David Coulthard’s final season in F1 was littered with clumsy accidents. Didn’t his first corner coming-together in the final race of 2008 just sum up his season?

Now it looks like it might be Rubens Barrichello’s turn to have a rusty final season. Certainly, his Australian Grand Prix weekend was about as error-strewn as it gets these days.

There was an off during Practice 2. A further spin in Qualifying 2 ended his session early, cementing 17th slot on the grid.

Then on lap one of the race he went off at turn 4. Some time later, he steamed into Nico Rosberg at the same corner. It looked suspciously like a ridiculously optimistic overtaking move that was only ever going to go wrong. But Barrichello later blamed his tyres. This sounds like a tall tale to me.

Rubens Barrichello is not the oldest driver on the grid this year. That accolade falls to Michael Schumacher, who is probably seen by most as a separate case. Schumacher faces his own kind of pressure — the over-the-hill seven times champion who should have stayed in retirement while his reputation was still in tact.

Beyond that, Barrichello is the stand-out old guy in F1. He certainly has the longevity and experience in F1 that no-one else has. He has started a truly staggering 300 grands prix. That is an astonishing 36% of all Formula 1 grands prix that have ever been held! But the experience doesn’t seem to be doing him much good at the moment.

I hope it doesn’t turn out to be the case. It’s impossible not to have a soft spot for the Brazilian. But I fear already that he may be having his “Coulthard year”.

2 comments

Blogging and the future of journalism

8 March 2009 02:03

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Current affairs, General, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Politics, Scotland, Technology

This week I helped out Peter John Meiklem on a story for the Sunday Herald about the future of journalism. Amid all the job losses in the Scottish media, the piece looks at whether bloggers can step up to the plate and begin to supplant traditional media outlets.

My view has long been that blogging is best consumed as a complement to professional journalism, as you’ll see if you read the piece. But of coruse there are other views out there, which the article also represents.

There are a few points I thought I’d mention, just to expand on or clarify a few points. It’s worth remembering what we mean when we talk about web stats. It’s a thorny area, and there isn’t really a good way to accurately estimate how many unique visitors a website has. I tend to look at visits rather than unique visitors because I think it’s more unambiguous.

I was a bit vague on the telephone about how many visitors this blog gets. I knew that all of my blogs put together get over 10,000 visits per month (this is the number I keep in my head because it’s nice and round, and it’s also sufficiently large to sound relatively impressive). In this case, it’s bad luck that the number of unique visitors to this blog in the month in question was 8,465. Not quite the >10,000 mentioned in the article, though if you throw in the numbers for my F1 blog vee8 it nudges above 10,000 unique visitors.

Apparently 10,000 per month is a similar readership to many local newspapers. I don’t know if this refers to the circulation of the hard copy or the figures for a local paper’s website.

Certain bloggers, who regularly post indulgent stat pr0n posts, get quite excited about how many visitors they get. But it’s worth remembering just how meaningless most visits actually are. Okay, this blog gets roughly 10,000 visitors a month. But it would be pure delusion to believe that there are 10,000 people out there who just can’t wait to read what I have to say.

Only an eighth of those visitors came here directly (i.e. on purpose). Over two-thirds of the visitors to this blog come from search engines. Of these, 94% have never come across this blog before. And 86% of search engine visitors to this blog look at one page and leave, spending on average a paltry 40 seconds here. They will probably never come back again, no doubt having failed to find what they were looking for. All-in-all, only 13% of this blog’s readers are returning for a second visit. Kudos to the 1% who have visited 100 times or more.

Of course, as always, these statistics come with all sorts of health warnings. Then there is the fact that many people are able to read blogs without ever having to visit, thanks to the magic of RSS. For what it’s worth, according to Feedburner, 270 people are subscribed to this blog.

Partly because of all the problems of getting accurate figures, I don’t get as hung up on stats as I used to. I like to know where traffic is coming from if someone has linked to this blog, but the numbers don’t excite me as much any more.

It’s come a long way though. I remember when I started out blogging, I used to be a bit freaked out when I saw the blog had had 60 visits in a day. That must have meant that I had (accidentally) said something too controversial or someone had ripped me to shreds and linked to it. Given that I was so young when I started blogging, they were probably right to do so. Eventually, getting 60 a day was the norm. Now 300 a day is a disappointment.

In the piece I am quoted as saying, “The average age of a blogger is around 40.” I don’t think that’s quite what I said (and I certainly didn’t intend to say that). I think the average age of the readers of political blogs is 40. My impression — it’s just a guess — is that the bloggers themselves are generally younger than that. But the point about blogging is that it can be — and is — done by people from all sorts of backgrounds. The eclecticism of the blogosphere is, of course, one of its biggest attractions.

As for the idea that the average reader of a political blog is aged 40, this is something I heard or read a long time ago and the source is long lost. I do like to pluck it out from time to time though to illustrate that blogging is not just a young person’s game. A quick search has yielded this study (PDF) which found that the median age of a political blog reader in the USA in 2006 was 49.

Another thing I wanted to mention was that the piece says that Guido Fawkes broke the story about North Lanarkshire Council’s head of communications job. In fact, my post about it was published about an hour before Guido’s, though I understand if more people came to learn about it through Guido. It’s also true that Gudio went a lot further, by actually naming the people involved, which I was reluctant to do.

Anyway, it’s great to have been quoted so much in the Sunday Herald this morning. I don’t mean to come across as sniping — inaccuracies are always bound to creep in, and you certainly couldn’t say that bloggers are much less error-prone.

One of the great things about having a blog though is that it allows me to clarify a couple of things which I said when I was working from the top of my head. That is one area where the blogosphere definitely has the upper hand over traditional media. On an open blog, some pedant like me will soon be along to point out the mistakes in the comments section. But the newspaper will never be corrected.

12 comments

Forza Minardi! Bravo Sebastian!

15 September 2008 01:24

Categories: Opinion

After the controversy of Spa, which I described at the time as being among the darkest days of F1, the Italian Grand Prix has provided the sport with its best day for a very long time. It’s the good news story F1 craved.

Sebastian Vettel has become the youngest ever Grand Prix winner at a scandalously young 21 years and 74 days. He is so young, he is the first person younger than me to ever win a grand prix. He becomes the sixth race winner of the season, and the third new winner. It’s a rich year for new talent.

What’s more, unlike the other first-time winners this year, Vettel did it on sheer skill. There was not a hint of a fluke about this. The normal front-runners were out of contention after they messed up in qualifying while Vettel sat his Toro Rosso on pole.

Heikki Kovalainen should have been able to challenge from second place in the vastly superior McLaren. As it was, the Finn never came close to challenging for the lead. On the podium, Kovalainen had a face like he was chewing a wasp, and quite rightly. He’s got a lot to be ashamed about. He was trounced today on merit.

But it wasn’t other people’s mistakes that allowed Vettel to win. The young German was simply mesmerising on the challenging Monza circuit, the fastest circuit on the calendar. In treacherously wet conditions where most other drivers slipped up, Vettel only deviated from the circuit once as far as I could tell, and it was just a harmless little trip across the chicane.

Vettel was absolutely in the groove. His composure just astounds me. When you think about his age, so many other people would have chucked it in the wall. But Vettel maintained a laser-like focus on the racing line and never looked in danger of losing this race.

Without a doubt, this has been one of the most impressive drives I have ever seen since I started watching Formula 1 almost a decade and a half ago. The magnitude of what we have seen at Monza can scarcely be described. It is a true giant-killing in every sense.

Toro Rosso are not supposed to win races. They are supposed to be the second string team. They are subsidised by the Red Bull team that is supposed to be further up the grid. They get Ferrari engines that are supposed to win races when they are placed in red cars.

Today Toro Rosso leapfrogged Red Bull in the Constructors Championship. And Sebastian Vettel comprehensively outperformed the Ferrari team whose cars could only finish 6th and 9th.

I am actually struggling to comprehend quite how Toro Rosso have pulled this off. Red Bull driver Mark Webber has talked about how they have the “new big red engine”. But Force India have a big red engine too. Heck, Ferrari have a big red engine. And Sebastian Vettel and his Toro Rosso team were the only people able to do anything with it in Monza.

The Toro Rosso team has been steadily improving as the season has continued. It has been slow but steady progress. Vettel’s team mate Sébastien Bourdais has also been performing well. He finished 1st in Q2 in Belgium and was on for a podium finish there until a disastrous final lap when he fell back through the field as conditions worsened while he was on the dry tyres. I felt very sorry for the Frenchman who struggled to hold back the tears when he was being interviewed about it.

I felt sorry for him today too as he stalled it on the grid having qualified 4th. He could only sit back and watch as Sebastian Vettel gave the world a demonstration of what the future of Formula 1 looks like. This man — who only has 22 grand prix starts to his name — has today shown the old hats and the young pretenders how it’s done.

The combination of national anthems that were played out on the podium today were familiar. The German national anthem followed by the Italian national anthem. That is the combination that greeted dozens of Schumacher victories for Ferrari. What an omen.

What is great, though, is the fact that Vettel is not a Schumacher. On the face of it, Sebastian Vettel is an unlikely grand prix hero. He’s not a bulky Webber or a square-jawed Coulthard or a 16-hours-per-day-in-the-gym Schumacher. Nor can I remember him playing one single dirty trick in his F1 career.

He is a lanky, gangly, goofy-looking kid. And despite his obvious raw talent, he doesn’t display a hint of arrogance. Of course he believes in himself. But he is polite and funny when being interviewed. Apparently he is very friendly in person. Unlike your Kubicas or your Räikkönens, charisma drips off this star. These people are not supposed to be so talented, they’re not supposed to have that drive to win.

In a lot of ways, it’s zero to hero in less than a year. In one of his first races he impressively ran in 3rd place before infamously crashing into his Red Bull team mate Mark Webber, prompting the Australian to launch into a foul-mouthed tirade on live British breakfast television.

Today, Webber and Vettel appear to get on very well. They will be team mates next year as Vettel is all set to move to the proper Red Bull team (whether this is the right choice for his career just now is debatable). And now Vettel is a race winner. An incredible rate of maturity.

Let us not forget the role of Mario Theissen in Sebastian Vettel’s career. The BMW boss gave the then-19-year-old his first shot in an F1 race in Indianapolis last year. Vettel ran across the chicane at the first corner, but otherwise stayed out of trouble and scored a point in his début.

Following today’s performance though, that other BMW protégé Robert Kubica now feels like old news. This even puts anything Hamilton has done over the past two years firmly in the shade. To win a race for a tiny team as Vettel has done is very different to winning a race in the fastest car as Hamilton has done.

Let us not forget that the Toro Rosso team is essentially the old Minardi team. They may be bankrolled by big Red Bull cash these days. But most of the team is still the same and it is still based at the same Faenza location. Every fan of F1 has a soft spot for these guys. They are an Italian F1 team that you can actually like.

You would dream of a Minardi win, but you would never believe it would happen. But today it has happened. Moreover, they did it in their home grand prix, the Italian Grand Prix, at that most historic of circuits, Monza. They’ll be dancing in the streets of Faenza tonight.

There is a lesson in there. Minardi were the bravest of the backmarkers. They have lasted for decades without winning a race. They could go for years on end without ever scoring a point. Yet they stuck at it and survived as a thousand and one other backmarkers came and went. And today, the years of hardship have paid off.

This is why we watch motor racing. These people do it for the love of the sport. Instead of dreaming of working for Ferrari, these guys dreamt of becoming Ferrari. And they were never deterred.

Thank you Giancarlo Minardi. Thank you Paul Stoddart. Thank you Dietrich Mateschitz. Thank you Gerhard Berger. And most of all, thank you Sebastian Vettel! Thanks for reminding us why we watch grand prix motor racing. Forza Minardi!

8 comments

More woes for Australian Grand Prix organisers?

7 March 2008 17:28

Categories: News, Opinion

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of stories surrounding the Australian Grand Prix. It must seem as though everyone wants to throw stones at Ron Walker and co.

Of course, this is nothing new. Bernie Ecclestone’s carping criticisms are par for the course whenever any circuit’s contract is coming up for renegotiation. Melbourne has most recently been feeling the heat.

And ever since the Australian Grand Prix moved to Albert Park back in 1996, environmental campaigners and pressure groups such as Save Albert Park have been trying their best to do away with the race. This report of a recent radio interview with Ron Walker highlights the increasingly hostile attitude that many Australians appear to be taking towards the Melbourne grand prix.

Due to its apparent political unpopularity, the race’s organisers have been trying their best to articulate the case for keeping the race in Melbourne in terms of the economic benefits and the race’s popularity in terms of attendance figures. But in the face of mounting pressure their case has begun to fall apart.

Increasingly it looks as though the race organises have been massaging attendance figures in order to project a better picture than is really the case. According to a report on Pitpass a few weeks ago, the “official” attendance figures include freebies, school excursions, corporate tickets and even competition prize tickets that haven’t been used! Despite the use of a variety of schemes to encourage people to attend, grandstands can look pretty empty.

A recent story published in The Age has raised some eyebrows in Australia. The newspaper wrote a report highlighting some home truths about Australian Grand Prix attendance.

Among the interesting information in the report is the fact that the organisers do not even know how many people attend the event. Nevertheless, organisers advertise it as “the best-attended grand prix in the world”, citing a figure of 301,000. Meanwhile, the Save Albert Park campaign group, using a more open and transparent process, have worked out that the “official” figure has been inflated by as much as 45%. Most astonishingly, the “official” figure is said to include “drivers, car mechanics, grid girls, hospitality staff, and even race bosses”.

As you can see if you have visited The Age website, the story now comes complete with a honking great “clarification” in bold writing at the top. According to Crikey, the way this has been handled is causing consternation among the paper’s staff.

The word around The Age newsroom is that after reporter Ben Doherty’s story was published, he was called in to editor [Andrew] Jaspan’s office to meet Grand Prix executives and answer their queries. This is extraordinary. Traditionally, editors shield their reporters from this kind of pressure, unless there is a clear case of error or misconduct. Even then, it is the editor’s role to deal with the interested parties.

Furthermore, the “bullshit” clarification does little to undermine the story. The very length of the clarification is apparently unprecedented.

The case for the Australian Grand Prix remaining in Melbourne appears to be fairly flimsy. In the face of increasing public dismay about taxpayers’ money being spent on the race, the race’s organisers appear to be adopting strong-arm tactics in order to keep a lid on the debate.

They used to call it a “great place for a race”. But are the days of Albert Park as an F1 venue numbered?

Any thoughts on this? Would you be sad to see Melbourne go? What possible alternative venues are there for the Australian Grand Prix?

H/T Colin Campbell

5 comments

Comments don’t belong on the MSM

7 June 2007 00:44

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Entertainment, Internet, Newspapers, Radio, Technology, Television

I used to be a big fan of comments, or at least the idea of comments. I thought that news websites should allow comments on every story. It seemed like quite a democratic way of doing things, to allow people to discuss an article, point out biases and the like.

However, when I thought that, I was forgetting one thing: most people are bloody morons.

And here is the unfortunate thing for the brave MSM outlets that have decided to allow comments of some form on their website. The number of morons as an overall percentage of participants in a comments thread is directly proportional to the popularity of a website (I’ve not done a scientific study on this, you understand. But we all know it’s true).

It is not difficult to understand the reasons why. Nincompoops can’t be bothered to find any smaller sites. And why bother when you have the opportunity to appear on the website of a very big newspaper or broadcaster and expose to the world your shoddily thought out arguments and even worse English.

There is bad news for us bloggers as well though. Because big blogs also have comment threads containing rivers of word-poo, comment spew and general all-out arse drizzle. Just think of the bigger British blogs. Iain Dale? Guido Fawkes? Harry’s Place? You need to put on a hygiene mask before clicking onto the comments sections.

Smaller bloggers like myself have it lucky. We might not have an audience of thousands, but at least generally good comments are posted here. I guess there is probably a “sweet spot” — probably a few hundred unique visitors per day — where the comments sections are generally good (if sometimes a tad on the short side). I am lucky enough to be there at the moment.

James Higham also counts among those lucky medium-sized bloggers. He has brought to my attention this article one The Age‘s website.

Honestly, I’ve had enough.

Enough of the flaming, the trolling, the moderation, the spam, the ‘who’s-got-more’ syndrome, the inanity and the sheer stupidity behind allowing them on sites like theage.com.au.

They devalue our content, insult much of our readership, piss off our advertisers, waste massive amounts of our time and place us at an enormous legal risk.

It is all true. The Guardian‘s Comment is free might be celebrated for… something or other. But it didn’t take long for it to gain a reputation of being a loon magnet.

Scotsman.com is also particularly bad. I often find myself scrolling down to read the comments, but I really don’t know why. They are always utter shit. Reading it is just a form of punishment. Do those people have two brain cells between them all to rub together? Doubtful.

I do often wonder if the high heid yins rather regret ever allowing comments on their website. It is an embarrassment to their newspaper and to the nation (ironic given that most of the commenters are nationalists).

Of course, if they ever took the comments away they would be accused of suppressing free speech and avoiding debate and so on. They are now stuck with the situation, having to persuade their advertisers to be associated with those rivers of comment-shit.

It would not surprise me if the other papers were in the same situation. I’ve had a glance on The Herald‘s website, but I don’t think I have the stomach to look any further. I have learnt about Bentham’s thoughts at university you know.

Of course, the exponent of the “shit comments on an MSM / popular website” phenomenon is the BBC’s Have Your Say section. Oh my goodness. Have Your Say is so bad that it has now has a blog dedicated to ridiculing it day in, day out.

spEak You’re bRanes is written by a brave person who goes through the pain of reading Have Your Say for the benefit of our entertainment. It has unveiled the different classes of commenter, from those with delusions of grandeur to armchair generals to good old racists.

Every person with any power behind the website of a media organisation should read this blog before allowing readers to leave comments to let themselves know what they are in for. It will be like dipping the bottom of every webpage on their site into an unflushed toilet.

Still, they should not be discouraged from allowing some kind of user-generated responses on their website. The problem is very easy to solve. It has been implemented by many newspapers. The answer is at the bottom of this post, just above the comments. And it is at the end of that piece on The Age website: Technorati widgets.

This has several advantages over comment sections. Morons would have to go to the bother of setting up their own blog. Although setting up a blog is dead easy, it requires much more effort than vomming up some words into a box, which is all they currently have to do.

Also, loons would be two clicks away from the bright lights of the popular / MSM website, which will surely take a lot of the incentive away.

And, as The Age‘s James Farmer points out, the conversation would almost certainly be better than what we currently have.

So why not just do it? I can understand that it might be difficult to remove comments sections, due to the risk of being burnt at the stake by all the loons who currently live there. But why can, for instance, the BBC not have a little box of responses via Technorati next to each news story (complete with “The BBC is not responsible for blah blah blah…”, of course)?

7 comments