Archive for category DeadJournal

AFL Canberra on LiveJournal clones

Posted by Laura on Wednesday, 10 February, 2010

AFL Canberra is a local Australian rules football league based in Canberra and affiliated with the AFL.  The teams in the league are Ainslie Football Club, Belconnen Magpies, Eastlake Football Club, Queanbeyan Tigers, Sydney Swans Reserves, and Tuggeranong Hawks. Some of the players in this league have been called up to train with AFL teams and one team is officially affiliated with the Sydney Swans.  The league’s core audience is centered around Canberra, though Wikipedia says the audience has decreased as other sports have grown in popularity.

Given the small size of the potential fanbase for the league and the small size of the communities on LiveJournal clones, the assumption is that the potential interest in the league would be tiny to non-existent.  For Dreamwidth, DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, Blurty, Inksome, CrazyLife and scribbld, this is true.  There are zero people who list any of these teams as an interest on those services.  The single exception to this lack of interest involves a Belconnen Magpies fan on JournalFen. That individual last updated 302 weeks ago and is from the ACT.  They were born in 1975.

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Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones

Posted by Laura on Wednesday, 3 February, 2010

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.

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National Rugby League on DeadJournal and JournalFen

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010

This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal and its clones. Two earlier posts were Australian Football League on JournalFen and Australian Football League community on DeadJournal. These posts acknowledge that the communities aren’t very big and in the grand scheme of things, this is not very meaningful in terms of understanding sports communities in Australia.

Australia’s second major sports league is the National Rugby League.  It is popular in different parts of the country than the Australian Football League., with more fans of and teams in the NRL hailing from Queensland than the AFL.   In terms of LiveJournal clones, it is interesting to compare the two communities in terms of size and state location.

For the AFL, JournalFen has a total of four fans for the league and specific teams.  The National Rugby League in comparison has zero fans who list it or specific teams as an interest on JournalFen.  JournalFen also has no communities dedicated to the league or a team.  This particular LiveJournal clone has always catered a bit more towards media fandom and it has a small community, with only 85 accounts having posted an entry in the last 24 hours.

The community on DeadJournal for the NRL is larger than the one on JournalFen.  The general interest in the league, expressed by listing NRL as an interest, was smaller than that of the AFL on DeadJournal;  5 people versus 13 people.

Of the five people who list the NRL as an interest, three list a year of birth or make it easy to determine, based on their profile description, their year of birth.  The years were 1987, 1988, 1989.  Four of the five listed the state they lived in: Three live in New South Wales and one in Queensland.  None of these accounts have been updated recently.  The most recent was 188 weeks, or a little over 3 and a half years ago.

There are a several fans for specific NRL teams on DeadJournal.  This small community of six people is twice the size of the team specific interest for the AFL.  The most popular team on DeadJournal is the Newcastle Knights, with four people listing the team as an interest.  Newcastle Knights fans list their years of birth as: 1986,1986, and 1987.  One person does not list a year of birth. Three people list their state of residence: Two are from New South Wales and one is from Queensland.  These fans haven’t updated recently with the most recent update 265 weeks ago.  Two other teams have people listing them as an interest: The Melbourne Storm and the South Sydney Rabbitohs.  Both these teams have one person listing them as an interest.  The Melbourne Storm is from Victoria, was born in 1987 and last updated 203 weeks ago.  The South Sydney Rabbitohs fan does not list a year of birth or state of residence; they last updated 388 weeks ago.

The NRL community on both JournalFen and DeadJournal is smaller than that of the AFL.  The small NRL community is based more in New South Wales than the AFL community on both services.  They are inactive and probably not relevant in any grand scheme of thing for determining the size and shape of both leagues online communities.

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Australian Football League community on DeadJournal

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010

DeadJournal is a LiveJournal clone. It isn’t very active. Only 279 accounts were updated in the past 24 hours. Despite this, Alexa indicated that this particular LiveJournal clone is more proportionally more popular in Australia than in the United States, where it ranks 37,038 compared to 100,135. Australian visitors account for about 6.1% of all visitors to DeadJournal.

I was interested to see the size and shape of the Australian Football League community on DeadJournal. To do this, I went to the Interest Search using AFL and each current and past team in the AFL. 13 people list AFL as an interest. Not all of these individuals are necessarily interested in the Australian Football League. The AFL also stands for the Arena Football League, a defunct indoor American football. It is possible that people listing AFL as an interest could be referencing this league, especially as the league formally folded this year. (It was in hiatus the previous year as a result of the economic downturn.)

Of the 13 people listing AFL as an interest, only two were Americans. Three people did not list what country they lived in. The other eight people were from Australia. Of these Australians, two were from Western Australia, two were from Victoria, two were from South Australia, one was from Queensland and one did not list a state.

Six of the eight Australians listed their year of birth. The mean, median and mode year of birth for these DeadJournal members was 1985. That puts their age at around 24 years.

The DeadJournal people listing AFL as an interest are not very active on the service any more. The most recent update of a journal by some one listing AFL as an interest was 66 weeks ago. That is 15 months ago. The mean last update for these 8 users was 309 weeks or almost 6 years ago. The median last update was 345 weeks or 366 weeks or 6 years and 7 months ago.

The community for specific teams is even smaller than general interest in the AFL. Of the sixteen current teams and three former teams, only three teams have people listing them as an interest. These teams are Collingwood Magpies, Port Adelaide Power, and the Western Bulldogs. Each of those teams has one person listing them as an interest and none list the AFL as an interest. All of those fans are from Melbourne, Victoria. The most recent update was for the Collingwood fan, who last updated 323 weeks ago. The Collingwood fan does not list a year of birth. The Port Adelaide Power fan lists a year of birth of 1987. The Western Bulldogs fan lists a year of birth of 1986.

The community for the AFL, based on interests, is small, young, Australian based and has been inactive for over three years. It will be interesting to see how this LiveJournal clone compares to others like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios, InsaneJournal and JournalFen.

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