Ozzie Sport

As the raw data set is getting quite big, I’m not going to include it in future posts. If you’re interested in seeing it, drop me an e-mail and I’ll happily send it along. Of the three games played on June 14, none of them cracked the top four positions in the leaderboard.

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 3: Foursquare checkin totals

It is day three and the trend appears to be fewer Foursquare checkins. It is interesting to speculate why. The six teams at the bottom of the checkin ladder all played in games with one European side. Two of those matches were against African sides and one was against Asian side. Those six teams failed to earn their supporters a swarm badge. Is Foursquare less popular in Europe than it is in English speaking countries? Do football fans from those countries use other geolocation sites? Let me know.

Ladder Table

Data Table

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 2: Foursquare checkin totals

With a few more teams having played, checkin patterns may be emerging. Only one game hasn’t gotten a swarm badge. The game involved an Asian team and a less popular European team. English language speaking countries doesn’t seem to be a factor for checkins at this point as the Nigeria vs. Argentina game was second.  I’ve also tacked on Gowalla data to the end of this post as there isn’t much there to really supply another post: People are just not using it at any volume similar to that of Foursquare.

Onwards with the data set…

Rankings Table

Raw Data

Gowalla

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 3: Foursquare checkin totals

To anyone who reads this regularly, I apologize in advance.  I may update this information with new posts on a fairly regular basis during the World Cup.   A question I’ve had prior to the World Cup was: Will certain teams have more foursquare checkins than other teams?  This has some interesting side questions that are not available from the data but are interesting to speculate about: Who is checking in to these games?  Are checkins by game reflective of the composition of a nation’s supporters who made the trip? (Or because certain national contingents are more likely to have smart phones that are compatible with South Africa’s mobile network?) Are tech savvy South Africans more likely to show up for certain games involving certain nations?

Only two games have been played so far.  There isn’t much data.  Both groups of fans should have earned swarm badges.  Below are two charts.  The first is the totals by team. The second is my raw data.

Totals and Averages by Team

Raw data

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 5: Foursquare checkin totals

If you don’t know, I’m doing research on online Australian sport fandom.  My focus is on demographic, geographic and social patterns.  In doing that, I’ve been gathering a lot of random data.  Get it now, analyze it later because you don’t know what matters until after the fact. Foursquare is one of those sites I’ve been getting data for, so I can see if say the AFL has more checkins than the NRL or if Sydney folks are more likely to check in than Brisbane fans.

The Socceroos have been big news in Australian sport for a while.  Around May 19, I searched Foursquare to create a list of all the World Cup venues so I could monitor checkins.  (I got the venue list from Wikipedia and then verified addresses elsewhere.) I wanted data before the Cup and during the Cup to see if some venues and teams had more checkins than others.  (My existing data can be found at ozziesport.com/WorldCup.xls .)  Back when I first got this data, I was a bit surprised that despite a lot of searching, not all the venues had been created.  I was certain there would have to be some sort of badges going to be in play as this is the biggest sporting event in the world.

This morning, I found a Mashable article which said, YAY! BADGES!  CNN was doing.  There are some issues as a researcher that bug me.  First, in one case, CNN created their own venue, while an existing venue had 17 checkins.  (Maybe they’ll merge later. ) In another case, CNN appears to have merged foursquare.com/venue/964020 with foursquare.com/venue/4410404 and in the process stripped -1173277 of their mayorship.  foursquare.com/venue/278284 , http://foursquare.com/venue/593221 were not impacted. foursquare.com/venue/2070295 was passed over for foursquare.com/venue/4410678 . Did they include Mbombela Stadium?  I can’t find a CNN logo in a description. foursquare.com/venue/1816219 passed over for  foursquare.com/venue/4408569 , with foursquare.com/venue/4570899 and foursquare.com/venue/4454189 also existing. foursquare.com/venue/655677 with 6 checkins passed over for foursquare.com/venue/4410289 with 1 checkin.  Not merged. Peter Mokaba Stadium and Royal Bafokeng Stadium appear to be missing from CNN’s list?  Soccer City has foursquare.com/venue/593339 with 18 checkins, foursquare.com/venue/4410569 with 12, foursquare.com/venue/4650733 with 1.  None of those three appear to be tagged by CNN.

I’m just having a moment of boggling and puzzlement here.  I’ll probably get over it shortly.  I just think that if Foursquare and CNN were going to do this, they should have planned it out earlier by creating the venues prior to the start of friendlies, should have merged all venues into one venue before the announcement and kept mayorships intact as they did multiple locations for the same venue mergers.

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)

I have only been keeping track of foursquare checkins since late April. I get the data between 9pm the day of and 9am the day after. One of the venues I’ve been getting data for has been ANZ Stadium in Homebush. I was curious as to how the State of Origin would rank compared to two of the home games played by the Bulldogs. The following chart shows that:

It looks like the State of Origin game attracted a different audience than Bulldogs and the Rabbitohs. Also worth noting,

there is a valid negative number in that set. It suggests that people are do delete their checkins. I can’t speculate why as I don’t know who deleted their checkin. I can just tell some one did. That suggests that the reliability of this data is similar to anything on the Internet: People delete and add content. The number you get may not be a total addition but rather the total after deletion and additions.

Related Posts:

• Data dump: Australian sport on bebo
• 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

This isn’t related to sports or academics at all.  It mostly has to do with my Foursquare obsession and adding buildings and places at the University of Canberra to Foursquare.  If you are on campus, there are a number of locations that have already been created that you can check in to.  They include:

• University of Canberra
• University of Canberra Library
• University of Canberra, Coffee Lounge
• University of Canberra, Building 12
• University of Canberra, Post Office
• Cafe Mizuna

There seems like there should be a way for universities to use Foursquare but I’m not certain what at the moment.  I’m more me centric of yay! Lots of university buildings for me to become the mayor of as I go from place to place around campus.

Related Posts:

• An Australian sport wiki
• World Cup, through quarter finals: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• Canberra Raiders data
• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders

Unlike my AFL dataset for foursquare, this one is a bit incomplete. I was missing at least two stadiums and for the first week I looked at, there might have been checkins not related to the game as there were four days between the time I recorded the data. I just wasn’t completely trusting of that for a venue that I didn’t think was single use.

That said, these are the games that I have recorded:

When that is broken down by team, it looks like:

NRL fans are appear to be less likely to check in to events. In one case, the venue where games are played is not even listed on Foursquare. The venue issue here appears differently than the AFL where at least two venues are actively promoting foursquare on social media sites like Twitter and encouraging people who attend games to checkin in order to get a swarm badge.

Non-mixed use facilities and facilities that are not shared with the AFL are also likely to have fewer seats with lower average attendance than the AFL. This could be a secondary factor for why there are fewer checkins. Another reason could be that adoption rates for foursquare are higher in Victoria than they are for New South Wales.

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
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Data dump: Australian sport on bebo

I’m a little obsessed with foursquare data at the moment and I’m doing this a little early.  I’ll probably update this on Tuesday with a new post after the St. Kilda Monday night match.  At the moment though, based on the two completed games so far this week and last week, this post answers what team has the largest community of Foursquare users.  The surprise is how Collingwood hasn’t run away with this.

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)

I’m not going to check foursquare daily to see how many checkins there were but I thought it might be useful historical data to have some benchmarks for how many people checked in over the course of a few days when one or two games might have been played at a venue.

In going back through my list, I’ve found a couple of things sort of worth noting:

• MCG at http://foursquare.com/venue/2141884 was merged with http://foursquare.com/venue/281644 around April 30/May 1.  The first url forwards to the second. http://foursquare.com/venue/480417 , http://foursquare.com/venue/2947320 and http://foursquare.com/venue/2618227 had the same issue.
• Etihad Stadium had a merge of http://foursquare.com/venue/2396681 with http://foursquare.com/venue/306196
• One venue lost a checkin and person.  I believe this was at Suncorp.
• Canberra Stadium name changed to Bruce Stadium on Foursquare. URL remains the same.
• More first time checkins to Melbourne Demons game, more visitors to St. Kilda at Etihad Stadium.  Some of this could be a result of a merge of another foursquare venue with it.

It should be easy enough for some one with some skill to automate this data to check how many daily updates there are.  (Which could be a nifty API…)  If such a tool exists already, please point me at it.  If you’re interested in building one specifically for this sort of thing, I’d love to know about it.

I’m not particularly interested in doing analysis this morning.  Instead, I’ve provided a table of my foursquare data I have so far.  If you use it for your own analysis, I’d appreciate a link back.

Related Posts:

• NRL ovals, fields and stadiums on foursquare
• AFL stadiums, fields and ovals on FourSquare
• The NRL on Foursquare
• Foursquare and the AFL