Ozzie Sport

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with some one at UCNISS about relationships between people and how these relationships, in sports, be almost predictive in terms of helping to determine sport performance.  Who coached a player?  Are their nodes of really good players that can be traced back to certain practices and coaches and cultures that could help explain why a team, much further down the chain, does well?  I don’t really have the data on that from a performance perspective.  What I do have is data regarding athlete and team follower patterns.  My most recent data, and I’m busy updating that now for the future, comes from late December 2010/early January 2011. This was a list of about 300 twitter accounts with the full list of accounts looked at being found on this post.  To analyse relationships, I took the list of twitter accounts, searched through every file that had an account on that list’s complete list of followed, removed all names that followed the account that were not on the list of Twitter followers.  Each occurrence was then put on a separate line. For example @harry_o, AFL, Collingwood -> @stkildafc, AFL, St. Kilda Saints could be a line.  I then created a chart using nodeXL. This was a complete mess because there were over 19,000 follows: Australian sport accounts follow other Australian sport accounts and they follow them a lot.  To make a better, more potentially meaningful chart, I eliminated the individual accounts as the means of looking at relationships and instead used the leagues.  This resulted in the chart below.

The red lines that you see are all extending from the AFL node: AFL accounts are following or are being followed by accounts from many Australian sporting competitions.  This chart doesn’t really give an idea of the weight so the table below shows the number of lines and the size of each node by looking at the league (consisting of the combined total of all accounts associated with it) and the followed (combined) that follow an account related to that league.  Why does this matter?  Example: More AFL related accounts follow a Cricket Australia related account than Cricket Australia people are following AFL related accounts.  I’d guess this is the Shane Warne effect.  I’m only including the top 105 connections, where there are 20 or more lines for a particular intersection.  The whole thing has 697 pairings, with 1 share pairings for things like Netball Victoria -> Horse racing.

I’m not entirely certain what this tells you. For me, it shows that like accounts follow like accounts. An account about the AFL is more likely to follow other AFL accounts than other leagues. It also shows that Australian sport on Twitter is very interconnected. For the major sports, there do not appear to be huge pockets of isolation away from other sports with the major expectation possibly being the AFL.

There might be something going on with the AFL. The NRL has issues in that AFL does not appear anywhere on its follow list. I don’t know where or why this is. There are NRL accounts that follow the VFL. The ANZ Championship doesn’t appear to be following the AFL either. Sport people following the AFL appear to be baseball players, tennis players and skateboarders. Confused.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)

Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location map

I’m trying to make a map of Australian sports fandom across various social networks.  This is going to take a long time and require a long explanation to understand exactly what you’re seeing.  This map isn’t intended to be all comprehensive.  I’m still collecting data and will likely continue to collecting data for a long time.    That’s why a long explanation is needed.

Country League Rugby: Group 21 is represented exclusively by the Facebook group SCONE THOROUGHBREDS RUGBY LEAGUE CLUB. Location was identified the location of the school network members listed themselves as belonging to.

For the NWBL, amongst the social networks I’ve checked so far, only You!Tube had people who listed the league.  And that was one person.  There were several people on Facebook who belonged the Wollongong Roller Hawks group and listed a network which I could affiliate with a city.

The AHL is represented by a Facebook group for the Tassie Tigers and three people on bebo. There were no fans on LiveJournal’s clones or blogger.

The AFL includes full data from 43things, bebo, blogger, eacademy, Daniel Jackson – TIGER TUFF!, Law Hawks and No matter how bad they are, I will still barrack for the Richmond Tigers! groups on Facebook, Gaia Online (but no one was an AFL fan who listed a city), LiveJournal and its clones, only Collingwood from MySpace profile search, only Brisbane Lions, Collingwood Magpies and Carlton Blues from orkut, only the scrapheap_afl mailing list on Yahoo!groups, and only the Geelong Cats on YouTube.

For the NRL, the following Facebook groups were included: Matt Johns to coach the Newcastle Knights in 2010! , Wests Tigers NYC and Melbourne-based Wests Tigers Fanatics. Only the Brisbane Broncos were looked at on 43things. Every team was searched for on bebo, blogger, Gaia Online, LiveJournal and its clones. The sample is much smaller than the AFL. (Though the community on bebo is much larger than AFL community on bebo. It might sort of make up for that.)

WNBL totals came from YouTube, MySpace, eacademy, bebo and LiveJournal clones.

For the NBL, only the Brisbane Bullets were looked at on 43 things. On Facebook for the NBL, unlike for most leagues looked at, an attempt was made to find every group connected to the team. Thus, the following groups and fanpages are represented: Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles, Adelaide 36ers, Adelaide 36ers are the greatest team of ANY kind EVER!!, Adelaide 36ers Fan Zone, Bring Allen Iverson to the Adelaide 36ers!, Bring Dusty Rychart back to the Adelaide 36ers ~ beg, plead, grovel ;p, Cairns Taipans , Croc Nation, Early 90′s Perth Wildcats appreciation group, Gold Coast Blaze, Melbourne Tigers, melbourne tigers are the best team, Melbourne Tigers Basketball Club, Melbourne Tigers cheer squeda east and south ends , Melbourne Tigers NBL HUMMER CHAMPIONS 2007/08, Melbourne Tigers NBL supporters, New Zealand Breakers, Official Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats (Catties Fans), SAVE OUR MELBOURNE TIGERS NBL TEAM , THIS SEASON., Save Our South Dragons:www. saveourdragons.com, South Dragons 2008/09 Nbl Champions, South Melbourne Dragons, The Melbourne Tigers Fan Group, The Official Adelaide 36ers Page, Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles and Wollongong Hawks. If this was done with other clubs and leagues, the representation for the AFL and NRL would probably be much, much bigger. Every team was looked at on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones. It also includes members of melbournetigers on Yahoo!Groups.

For the VFL, only the Geelong Cats and Coburg Tigers were checked. On MySpace, Frankston Dolphins , Sandringham Zebras , Werribee Tigers , Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats were checked. All teams were checked on LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo.

A-League is represented by a search of all teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones. Orkut was searched for Melbourne Victory fans. It might not show up on the first version of this map because after about seven layers, the mapping software gets slow.

Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location map

Related Posts:

• A social media/web snapshot of Collingwood, Hawthorn and Port Adelaide
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy

This is mostly a follow up to Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones and Another problem team is problem: Tasmanian Tigers.  I finished looking at the other networks that I’ve been looking at so far: Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo!Groups.  Given the size of this league and some of the name issues (two teams sharing names with other, bigger teams), I wasn’t surprised that the size was so tiny on these networks.  There isn’t enough data to provide any sort of meaningful analysis so I’m just providing a table of the size of the communities on the aforementioned networks based on the methodology discussed in other posts.

The AHL has zero presence that I can find on Twitter, which is a bit surprising.  No one appears to even be reporting on them.  They also appear to not have a presence on Facebook.  Developing these two would probably help increase their overall visibility.

Related Posts:

• Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones
• Data dump: Australian sport on YouTube
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location

As mentioned in the earlier post, I’m focusing on a broad range of teams.  I went looking for information on the Australian Hockey League teams and first class cricket teams.  One problem that came up involved the Tasmanian Tigers.  Why?  That is a team name for a team in the AHL and for Australian first class cricket.  It isn’t particularly problematic on LiveJournal clones, where no one lists the Tassie Tigers as an interest.  It does get problematic on blogger, where two people list the Tasmanian Tigers as an interest.  Looking at both profiles, the assumption can probably safely be made that the Americans are interested in the animal, not the hockey or cricket teams.   It isn’t particularly problematic on bebo, where the only person listing Tasmanian Tigers as an interest has a cricket icon.   LiveJournal has 23 people listing Tasmanian Tigers as an interest and I have yet to go through each profile to try to guess which one they meant.  Meep.

This is another example of a problem team that makes trying to figure out the fan community size problematic.

Related Posts:

• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Popularity of Australian sports leagues across various social networks

Wikipedia says that the AHL is Australia’s “premier national domestic field hockey competition. Despite its non-professional nature, AHL is considered one of the strongest and most competitive national field hockey leagues in the world.”  There is a men’s and women’s league.  On the men’s side, the teams include New South Wales Waratahs, NT Stingers, Southern Hotshots, Tassie Tigers, Victoria Vikings, and WA Thundersticks.

Unsurprisingly, no one lists these teams as an interest on blogger, LiveJournal or LiveJournal’s clones.  These are niche teams for a small audience.  The sport isn’t likely to have much international interest.  The league isn’t professional.  The Australian audience on these services isn’t that big or active.  It seems unlikely that they will ever garner a community around them unless some one comes in and brings their own audience for this content.

Related Posts:

• Data dump: Australian sport on YouTube
• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)
• Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger
• Australian Football League on LiveJournal clones like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios and InsaneJournal