The AFL on Yahoo!Groups

This entry was posted by Laura on Thursday, 7 January, 2010 at

There is a directory for Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Australian Football League.   There are 276 lists found in it.   There are an additional 195 listed in the Clubs and Team subcategory.  And then there are the following counts for team specific subcategories:

It is possible to get data from some of these lists if you either join them or member data is public.  (scrapheap_afl for instance has 25 members and hasn’t been updated since August 2009.   Eight people list their ages with an average age of 38. Eight people list their country.  Two are from Australia, two are from the United Kingdom and four are from the United States.  Nine people list their gender and all are male.)  For mailing lists that require joining to get the information, most of them have open membership.  Spammers than join and post unrelated, offtopic spam.  This spam problem thus makes the data very suspect.  The number of communities is also suspect because there are several instances of incorrect categorization.  For instance, there is an Indian department soccer team grouped in the Western Bulldogs category.

If we were looking for a reason to use this data, it might be best used for historical purposes: When were these communities created and when were they most active?  When did they go inactive?  This data would have to be currated manually as the suspect groups would need to be removed and periods of high spam posts would need to identified.  Hopefully, in the next day or so, I can provide some data that has the creation dates of Yahoo!Groups to help begin to analyze these patterns.

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  • http://geopoliticallyincorrect.blogspot.com/ Adelaide Dupont

    That would be great to see the dates of creation.

    Many of the Yahoo Groups were once Yahoo Clubs. (circa 1999: I got onto Yahoo in March 2000, but had known about it since it had started).

    It would have been good to look at some of the smaller samples, even if it meant looking at one or two groups.

  • http://www.fanhistory.com LauraH

    I might get around to trying to get data from one or two communities at some point. The limited stats from the one community I looked at just felt all out of whack with reality. For me, to understand what is really going on, there are three big pieces:

    1) Demographic characteristics of a group,
    2) Statistical data regarding historical activity levels, and
    3) Qualitative analysis explaining how the two above work in relation to content analysis and other real world factors.

    The current posts I've been working on have mostly been focusing on the first. The Yahoo!Groups bit are focusing a bit more on the second. I can get similar data regarding group creation dates for LiveJournal (and clones) and bebo where there are communities for them to paint a picture of migration patterns. I can also track activity levels for Yahoo!Groups and LiveJournal to see where spikes happen. (Does a team need to be doing well for the online audience to be active? Does interest fall off during the off season? Do both correlate to attendance?) Long term, if I get into the PhD program I applied for, I can hopefully begin to figure out what these patterns and offer explanations.

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