The New South Wales Swifts were originally the Sydney Swifts and part of the Commonwealth Bank Trophy. When the event change and became the ANZ Championship and became more of a state versus state netball competition, the team’s name change. The team names are used interchangably here depending on the original usage.
The team has been discussed in an earlier post about the size of the ANZ Championship community on Twitter. This post will look into the specific community dedicated to the New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups.
There is one group dedicated to the Sydney Swifts on Yahoo!Groups. It was created on May 16, 2001 and currently has 50 members. The group has been neglected and been the subject of spam starting in 2005. Prior to that, discussion on the list had ended in March 2002 (with the admin having deleted three spam e-mails in November 2003). There were 84 legitimate posts to the list in this period. Graphing it, the posting volume looks like:
This posting pattern is similar to that of the some of the less active AFL teams on Yahoo!Groups. I joined the list to find out membership demographic information. Only eleven of the current members joined when there was active posting to the list. Ten people joined in the period with no posting, and the other 29 joined during periods of active spamming. Of the 50, only four listed their demographic information. When the list was active, the person who listed their age has 21, female and Australian. After the period of active spam, the three people listing demographic information were all male and older. Of the two who listed their country of residence, neither listed Australia. (For the totals on Yahoo!Groups on my chart, this will listed at 50, despite the the fact that only 21 or so are probably legitimately interested in the team. At the moment, I do not have the time and ability to join every team related mailing list to determine who is and is not a legitimate poster based on join date.)
On LiveJournal, there are two people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest. Of the two, one updated a week ago, is 22 and from New South Wales. The other has not updated in 162 weeks and does not list a country of residence.
There are four people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest on bebo and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest. Only one lists their age, 20. The other three list their location and all are based i New South Wales.
The community on Twitter is the largest, with 90 people following the official team account. Facebook, surprisingly, has no one listing the team as an interest. Yahoo!Groups probably legitimately had the second largest following with 21 if we only count back in the day. The fact that bebo and LiveJournal both have bigger interest than Facebook is also surprising.