Ozzie Sport

In my previous post, I looked at the number of checkins on foursquare at AFL facilities. This time, I’m looking at NRL facilities. The list of stadiums I’ve included are based on austadiums’s list. I love data like this for several reasons.

First, it helps to give an idea of the size of specific fan communities and their engagement with social media. (Though Foursquare doesn’t indicate true size of a social media community for a team. Some groups just trend towards certain sites and services. Universal statements are dumb and often wrong. Give me an unfounded statement and I will happily see if I can drive a truck through it.)

Next, Foursquare is probably one of the better services out there, outside of a team’s own mobile applications through app providers like Apple and their own analytics regarding browser usage, for getting an idea as to the size of the community using mobile devices and if this group is worth targeting.

Third, foursquare can give an idea as to the geographic distribution of a league’s fanbase who use mobile devices. This can then be compared to other geographic patterns on sites like blogger, bebo, LiveJournal and facebook. You’re not necessarily getting information on where fans live but you could begin to do an interesting analysis on patterns of what fans do and where their geographic center is. This could be interesting because for some teams, they share a facility in a larger city. A lot of fans will list their location as say Melbourne, where the actual core of Melbourne is about one square mile. People just chose to list that, instead of say St. Kilda.

That out of the way, the table below is sorted by the number of total checkins. The top facility not shared by the AFL is Sydney Football Stadium. It is also the top non-shared AFL/NRL facility. Suncorp Stadium is the next biggest non-shared use facility. It too is an NRL facility. Brunswick St Oval is actually the first non-shared use AFL facility and 98 checkins. The next two non-shared use facilities are also AFL. In either case, I felt kind of surprised that the NRL facilities had as many checkins as they did. I was under the impression that rugby league country was not as into the social media scene as areas dominated by the AFL.

Related Posts:

• Notes on AFL/NRL foursquare sporting venues in Australia
• AFL stadiums, fields and ovals on FourSquare
• The NRL on Foursquare
• Foursquare and the AFL

I’ve been obsessed with foursquare for about a month now.  I love it because I like the idea of earning things, like badges.  It gives my social media experience more meaning as a result.  (It doesn’t really, I just think it does because I’ve earned these badges.)  In May, I shall be seeing an AFL game in Canberra and I really want to check in to the stadium because yay! More checkins.  This peaked my curiosity as to how many people had already checked in to this venue (Answer?  None.)   and in to other AFL stadiums across the country.  Today, I got a list of AFL stadiums from austadiums and then searched for the facilities with those names on Foursquare.  Having done that, I got the following chart, which not surprisingly shows the most checkins at Melbourne based AFL stadiums.

For clarification, if a line is blank and has no url, I searched for the location in the city listed on austadiums and nothing appeared. Duplicate entries appear when there were duplicates for the same location. Type includes the default listing. If no type is listed, none provided on the listing.

Apparently, Essendon was heavily promoting people checking into the MCG on Foursquare on ANZAC day so that people could get the Swarm badge. That could also account for the really high numbers of the Melbourne Cricket Grounds.

Related Posts:

• Notes on AFL/NRL foursquare sporting venues in Australia
• NRL ovals, fields and stadiums on foursquare
• Foursquare and the AFL
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

The Melbourne Storm cheating controversy with their salary camp has gotten a fair amount of attention by the Australian Twitter community and in local newspapers.  Given that, I was curious to see how the Wikipedia community had responded in terms of number of edits to the Melbourne Storm article.  I took a look at the article’s history about an hour before I posted this entry.  I then counted the total number of edits by day.  Wikipedia’s history is recorded at UTC.  This is a bit important when looking at time related data…

Most of the edits were made on April 22.  This was, based on UTC, the day the story broke.   Total edits spiked again on April 24.  After that, there was a huge drop off.  The story broke quickly, people edited and then after most of the pertinent details were added, they stopped editing.  Some of the drop off can probably be explained by:   (Protected Melbourne Storm: Excessive vandalism ([edit=autoconfirmed] (expires 09:52, 1 May 2010 (UTC)) [move=autoconfirmed] (expires 09:52, 1 May 2010 (UTC)))).

It is an interesting bit of pattern behavior and it would be interesting to go into further depth regarding other historical editing patterns for the article and who edited the article, and if they had ever edited the article prior to this latest controversy.  That’s for another post some time in the future.

Edited to add: There is an Italian language article about the Melbourne Storm.  There have been 15 total edits to the article singe it was created on December 21, 2007.  The article had 2 edits in 2008 and 1 in 2009.  In period of breaking news around this story, there has been 1 new edit made to the article.

More edited to add: There is a French language article about the Melbourne Storm.  It was created on March 1, 2006.  There have been 27 total edits to the article since the controversy started.  There were 59 total edits to the article, including these.

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups

• RT @Essendon_FC: Official Essendon iPhone app has been submitted to Apple for approval – will be released to market soon! is.gd/bBh3x #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Twitter follower information
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

• Interesting article about Australian sports ownership model: bit.ly/bHJ62f #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Twitter follower information
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

• nrl.wikia.com: The NRL wiki community : bit.ly/cb4vd6 #
• afl.wikia.com: The AFL wiki community : bit.ly/bBW67t #
• aflpedia.wikia.com: The AFL wiki community: bit.ly/c98zHI #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Twitter follower information
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

australianfootballleague.wikia.com is yet another tiny Wikia wiki dedicated to the AFL.  This one has three real articles.  Like two of the other AFL wikis on Wikia, it has an article about a team.  The team for this wiki, the Geelong Cats, is one not found on the other wikis looked at.  It has only eight real edits of which five were made by one individual and the rest were bot created.

Having looked at three small wikis so far, it looks like individuals make small wikis because they are fans of a specific team and then later lose interest and mostly abandon them.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

aflpedia.wikia.com is another small Wikia wiki dedicated to the AFL.  It is slightly bigger than afl.wikia.com with 6 real articles and 18 edits.  It was founded in May 2009, later than afl.wikia.com.  There are three articles about specific teams: The Collingwood Magpies, the Melbourne Demons and the Hawthorn Hawks.  The article about the Collingwood Magpies is the most edited article on the wiki with eight edits made by two people.  The edit to the Melbourne Demons article contains only one link, to a Melbourne Demon wiki.

This wiki should probably be merged with afl.wikia.com, or another Wikia related AFL.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

afl.wikia.com is a tiny, two page wiki hosted on Wikia. One page is the main page for the wiki.  The other page is an article dedicated to the Adelaide Crows.  A total of 6 edits have been made to this wiki, with half coming from bots or Wikia staff.  There really isn’t much more that can be said about this wiki other than it exists, it is dedicated to the AFL and has never developed a community.  There is a footy wiki on Wikia.  That wiki is probably where most editors for the AFL on Wikia can be found.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

nrl.wikia.com is a small wiki dedicated to the National Rugby League and the State of Origin.  It is not a very active wiki and doesn’t even have an article about every team in the NRL.  It has a total of 20 articles with about three redirects and has been around since September 2008.  In that period, there have been a total of roughly 112 edits made by 17 contributors.   Of these, five have made more than 10 edits.  They are:

Rey76                     19
JWykes                  18
Emosworld            17
209.66.200.45     15
KapitanYnot         12

Only two articles had more than ten edits.  These articles include Sydney Roosters with 16 edits and Canterbury Bulldogs with 15 edits.  The wiki has gone through several “active” periods that can be seen on the chart below.

If there is an active NRL wiki community, it probably isn’t here.  Most likely, it would be found on Wikipedia or a wiki created by fans on their own domain.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Joel Monaghan’s Mad Monday and the Online Canberra Raiders Fan Base
• Data dump: Australian sport on bebo