Live blog helpers needed

19th September 2008, 11:00 by Keith Collantine 16 Comments »

The F1 Fanatic live blogs during race weekends continue to grow. During the Italian Grand Prix 334 people joined in and contributed almost 2,500 comments – and this was during the race alone, there were even more in the practice and qualifying sessions.

With an exciting end to the season in prospect and the F1 Fanatic live blogs appearing on a growing number of websites, those figures are going to get bigger.

The live blogs are run by myself plus a group of moderators. They all do an excellent job, but in order to keep the blogs running smoothly and to reduce the burden on the current moderators we could do with some extra help. Here’s some details on how you could get involved:

Moderators

We need moderators to ensure the comments received during the live blog are published as quickly as possible. Moderators need to be able to help out during qualifying and/or the race. The task simply involves monitoring comments as they come in, publishing those that are suitable (a one-click job), which tends to be the majority of comments.

The more moderators we have, the less each moderator has to do in total. At present each moderator covers between 15 and 30 minutes of action. Obviously I’d like to make the time comitment as small as possible, but to do that we need more moderators.

If this is something you are interested in doing, or want to enquire further, please contact me via the contact form or leave a comment below using an email address I can contact you by. (Email addresses arre never published or passed on to third parties). No commitment is required at this stage.

Commentators

Many users of the live blogs are people who are unable to watch or listen to the race live, or see timing screens. As a result, we get a lot of requests for basic information about the races.

In order to help anticipate those queries, I’m looking for some people to contribute by providing short, basic, factual commentary during qualifying and/or the race. This would cover things like:

  • Which lap the race is on / how much time is left during a session
  • Significant changes in gaps between cars
  • Running order

I’m not looking for one person to do all these things – potentially we could have a number of commentator each doing a fairly small role.

In order to do this you would need access to F1.com’s live timing facility during the sessions.

If you’re really keen you could be both a commentator and a moderator, but that would probably be a lot to try to do at once!

Again if this is something you are interested in doing, or want to enquire further, please contact me via the contact form or leave a comment below using an email address I can contact you by. No commitment is required at this stage.

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