Ozzie Sport

• They gave me two stamps on my frequent sipper card and it isn't even Tuesday! (@ Gloria Jean's Coffees) 4sq.com/aUtBFb #
• I strongly suspect what I thought was a 1pm meeting for today is not. Communication fail happened but not certain where. #
• Going to pay the $20 to join WMF-AU chapter. bit.ly/dEUqEo Weeee. #
• Yeah. Major copy and paste fail. :/ #
• As soon as we can raise Jon or svip, we're going to do a lock down on all editing to Fan History. It's been an awesome ride. #
• As Fan History editing is turned off, I feel like I should change my e-mail address. :/ #
• We've created a writer class. If you still want to contribute, e-mail @purplepopple and she can set you up. #
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23) : bit.ly/dJVBUB #
• bit.ly/dzhFMg is possibly one of my favorite tools for writing blog entries EVER. #
• I've got 805 words written towards one of my appendixes. It may later need to be integrated into my paper. #
• Still, at 805 words for three sites out of 20? I hope not. #
• The tech support @unicanberra was fail for me today. Guy didn't speak English to understand me, didn't listen, told me to e-mail but no give #
• And now I can't log in period because things were frozen. My department rocks but sometimes, the university sucks. #
• I apologize for previous rudeness. I'm a grumpy pants American who is missing her family around Thanksgiving and stressed out. :/ #
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24) : bit.ly/hhJsRe #
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24) : bit.ly/fRAvBu #
• Appendix A: Data Gathering Site Specific Methodologies (draft 1): bit.ly/e7Kgkn #
• Thanksgiving Football: Tradition In Need of Update by @chicagoist: chicagoist.com/2010/11/24/thanksgiving_football_tradition_in.php #
• Sometimes, I have confusion as to what account I'm using. Whoops. #
• I'm a Fan of Survivor on @GetGlue bit.ly/bNvGTc #
• According to a FH contributor, FFN purged all of its forums, 2/3 of all posts are lost! #
• And my tool to automatically pull the total fans/members on Facebook works. Yay! #
• Site rank and Australian/Kiwi women's sport : bit.ly/gDUFfw #
• I am busy being completely off task. :/ #
• Bebo and Australian/Kiwi women's sport : bit.ly/dSlUuD #
• I'm a Fan of Covert Affairs on @GetGlue bit.ly/bNvGTc #
• Digg and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport : bit.ly/hA2vtt #
• eBay.com.au and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport: bit.ly/i48NaT #
• I'm looking for some one who is interested in AU/NZ women sport who might look at a packet I'm putting together and could me feedback? Help? #
• Er. That's a request for feedback. Because not sure how useful this is and need help assessing. #
• If you follow 57,000 people like @wildwasser does, you should be banned from following. #
• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport : bit.ly/etWFpO #
• Rereading stuff I wrote and my grammar is embarrassingly poor. #
• MWA HA HA HA. Packet wise? Picasa, Twitter, Wikia, Wikipedia, Yahoo!groups, YouTube left. Wait. That's more work than I thought. #
• 503 error when I try to log into myUC. Fun times. #
• I need to finish editing second drafts of first four chapters of dissertation and write a new chapter so I can live off off task for hols. #

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Gaia Online is a role playing network that has a number of social networking components. It is relatively popular in Australia and tends to cater to a teenaged audience. This type of audience may be a desirable for Australian and Kiwi women’s sport because reaching them may encourage participation in those sport and help improve women’s fitness. Beyond that, getting a younger audience can help insure the continuity of the team’s fandom by having fans who can pass on those allegiances as they get older. At the same time, younger fans likely will need to bring friends or family to attend competitions. This means a potential to maximize ticket sales.

An Australian and Kiwi sport community does exist on the Gaia Online. It is just relatively small and focused on soccer, rugby union, rugby league and Aussie rules.

Given the tiny size of the Australian and Kiwi sport population for men, it is hardly surprising that when profile interests were searched, no one was a fan of women’s sport.

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• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
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Flickr is a photo sharing site owned by Yahoo. According to Alexa, it is the 36th most popular site on the Internet and 30th most popular in Australia. Flickr has made it easy for people to upload their pictures on the move by creating mobile applications that allow sharing from phone’s camera.

To get an idea for the popularity of Flickr in Australia and New Zealand, a search was done for Australia in the pictures search section. It had 5,856,165 results. A search for Sydney had 2,678,431 results. A search for New Zealand had 2,136,668 results. The interest in taking pictures of both countries is high.

Interest in sport is also high. A search for all the AFL teams results in around 200 to 500 images each. There are several groups on Flickr specifically dedicated to the league and its teams. The generic term surf Australia has 73,441 results, demonstrating that interest goes beyond traditional professional sports and into niche sport and participation sports. Sport organizations inside Australia have begun to realize its value: Canoeing Australia has set up its own Flickr account to upload pictures.

Why are picture sites like Flickr important? What can they tell us about Australian and Kiwi women’s sport? They are important because they help grow the visibility of the sport. Well composed, beautiful pictures can help really sell sport in a way that text, the primary method of sharing on most of the sites referenced so far, cannot. This visibility could translate into ticket and event sales: These women play so beautifully I should check them out in person. Beyond that aspect, Flickr can also help identify what type of content that people are interested in based on the type of pictures they take. This group can thus be catered to more by creating events or providing similar content on a team or athlete’s internet stream. If there are a lot of event pictures, have a meet up for Flickr and Picassa users during a practice session where they are invited to take pictures of athletes in motion. If there are a lot of pictures that are like head shots and traditional promotional images, then a consideration should be made to include more of that content and make it available where online users can access it. Both of these require a bit of content analysis but a most people will be looking at only only team or a few athletes, this becomes much more feasible.

Pictures can also be useful in terms of identifying potential employees. If there are one or two people who take beautiful pictures, they might be worth contacting to see if they can be brought in in an official capacity. Their work sells the team or athlete already, but by doing that, you help add validation to their work which might get them a bigger audience. This in turn can lead to increased visibility for the team or athlete as each party gets the benefit of the other’s audience.

Beyond the issues above, another way of understanding photographer interest in women’s sport involves the total search results, which when compared to other teams can be useful. It gives another perspective on the comparative interest amongst the more creative classes of Internet users and the kind who get out into the real world to engage in the things that they love. Group results and total members to those groups provides perspective on the total comparative audience for the work of photographers.

The table below includes data from all the total search results found by searching Flickr for total number of images related to a keyword. It is sorted by league and then team. It highlights the popularity of swimming in Australia, though the search results rarely refer to Swimming Australia sanctioned events or Australian swimmers who compete internationally. The W-League results are extremely high and undoubtedly include pictures from the American league with the same name. When looking at individual teams, it appears that the ANZ Championship, W-League and WNBL all have comparative levels of interest. The Australian Women’s Ice Hockey League has zero results and there is obviously much less interest in it.

The table below includes the results when searching for groups related to Australian and New Zealand women’s sport. The total search results is small and there are no relevant groups. This suggests a couple of possible things. First, that while people are interested in taking pictures of women’s sport, they do not see their primary interests being focused around organizing people around women’s sport. Second, being photographers of specific women’s sport is not part of their internalized identity in such a way that they need to continually affirm it. Third, that Flickr may not have a large audience for specific Australian and New Zealand women’s sport that the upload totals might suggest is there.

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friendster is small social networks.  Alexa ranks it as the 685th most popular site on the Internet and the 1,483th most popular site in Australia.  It is not nearly as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but is more popular than bebo and appears to have a slightly more active community.  In 2009, friendster was acquired by an Asian company and sought a more Asian audience and worked to improve the mobile version of the site.  Given that, the direction of the site, if Australian and Kiwi sport teams are looking at friendster, it should probably be with an eye towards growing their Asian audience.  This focus would not necessarily lend itself to women’s sport outside of soccer.

Despite the potentially limiting audience and best approach to using the site, it is worth looking at as the more sites examined, the greater the understanding of how Australian and Kiwi women sport fandom exist on the Internet.

One of the ways friendster fosters communities is through groups.  There are several Australian sport related groups, including one for the Socceroos with over a hundred members and one for the Melbourne Victory with over sixty.   While this community for men’s sport exist, the same does not appear to be true for women.

Searching friendster groups is done by country.  For this, search was conducted for Australian groups.  If quotation marks are not used, every group that mentions any of those terms is used.  That means that pages and pages of search results need to be sorted through or quotation marks need to be used in order to improve search results.  This is not ideal as many women’s sport teams use common words or have multiple names, if sponsor names are considered.  The results below give an idea as to how this plays out.

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This list is far from complete. It is a beginning attempt on my part to really start to work on it. I’m hoping the labels regarding official/unofficial pages are accurate but they are worth double checking just to be sure. If you know of any fanpages or groups I should be watching that aren’t on this list, comment to let me know.

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