Ozzie Sport

I removed the last article I had about Hinch because I made one big number mistake: I used total year stats for Ozziesport instead of December 2010 stats.  I made this mistake repeatedly when it came to server statistics and Google Analytics data. When this was corrected for, the totals were a bit different and Hinch had double the traffic I had estimated, closer to 99,900 visitors on his server and 42,330 visitors using Google Analytics.  I apologize for this error.  I did not have my blog piece’s statistics checked like I should in my haste to put something on my blog. I’m rather embarrassed and very apologetic regarding this error.  The post below is a first draft of a chapter for my dissertation.  This time, I spent a lot of extra time to check my math and my numbers so I would not repeat that error again.

Derryn Hinch has been described as a shock jock. (Rebecca, 2010, March 22)(van den Berg, 2010, September 21) (Woolveridge, 2005, May 19) It is a label that he does not use to describe himself. (Hinch, 2010, September 21)  He has been involved in several Australian controversies that touch on politics, crime and sport.  Most of these controversies had connections with things he said on the radio. (Derryn Hinch, 2010, December 28)

During the St Kilda nude photo controversy, Hinch was one of the loudest voices in questioning the AFL and St Kilda.  He made multiple blog posts about the subject, demanding answers to questions he asked pursuant to that controversy. (Hinch, 2010, December 24) (Hinch, 2010, December 28) (Hinch, 2010, December 29) (Hinch, 2011, January 14) He has interviewed the girl who published the pictures.  He promoted his blog entries on his Twitter account at @humanheadline.   When most of the media dropped the story, Hinch continued to follow it.  A December 27, 2010 tweet by Hinch claimed his site got more than 2 million hits in December.

This purpose of this chapter is to examine two things.  The first is the veracity of Hinch’s claim regarding getting 2 million hits.   It is important to have an accurate number about the likely volume of traffic to Hinch’s website as most of the traffic between December 19 and December 27 was likely a result of the St Kilda controversy.  If Hinch’s numbers are to be believed, the controversy had a much wider audience than the St Kilda chapter in this dissertation would have you believe.  Once the likely volume of traffic to Hinch’s website has been determined, it will be compared to the traffic to related articles on Wikipedia.  The secondary purpose to help understand how traffic to “shock jock” media sites differs from latent, likely non-fan interest in the story as measured by Wikipedia article views.   “Shock jock” journalist driven media site and Wikipedia likely cater to two distinct audiences.  Understanding how these different audiences function can help provide greater understanding for how Australian sport fandom responds to major controversy and where an audience interested in these controversies turns to for information.

The first thing that needs to be done is to determine the accuracy of Derryn Hinch’s traffic data.  His claim is that he received 2 million hits in the period between December 1 and December 28.  In order to verify this data, the method he used for determining his hit totals needs to determined.  This was done using Quarkbase, a web site analysis tool that can tell you what tools a website has installed.  Hinch.Net was checked  was found to only have Apache/2.2.3 (Webserver) installed.  This contrasts with OzzieSport.com,  the author’s website, which has QuantCast (Traffic Monitoring), wordpress (Blog), Google Analytics (Traffic Monitoring), StatCounter (Traffic Monitoring), Apache/1.3.41 (Webserver), and WordPress (Traffic Monitoring) installed.  Hinch does not have popular traffic monitoring tools like Quantcast or Google Analytics installed.  He does not have software like WordPress that has its own statistics package installed.  Hinch’s lack of having Google Analytics and Quantcast installed means that he does not have industry standard traffic measuring tools installed; his method of counting traffic is not the accepted one.  Further, this shows Derryn Hinch’s method of counting traffic involves server statistics.  Server statistics count hits differently than Google Analytics and Quantcast. Server generated statistics may include all non-human access including Google bot access, pingback spam, other bots accessing the site, Baiduspider , Alexa, MSN bot, Yahoo slurp, the Internet Archive, Google Adsense access, etc.  It counts as hits all internal pages and images that the site maintainer accesses.  It counts every human accessed file as a hit: If a web page has 100 images, two .css files and two java script files, that would count as 105 hits.  A January 17 image count for Hinch’s main page reveals that there are 51 images that load off his server: Visiting his main page would mean at least 52 hits to his server.  Assuming everyone who visited only his main page was actually human, divide 2,000,000 by 52 equals 38,461 views of his home page.  Total page views of 38,461 suggests a scale of traffic different than 2,000,000.  This disconnect is part of the reason that Google Analytics, not server statistics, are an industry standard.

Another way of looking at the problems for Hinch’s server statistics is to compare them to actual totals from another site.  In this case, the other site is OzzieSport.com’s statistics as the author has access to them.  They are visible in Figure 1.

Figure 1. OzzieSport.com server statistics.

The chart in Figure 1 is the traffic as measured by Awstats, a server side method of tracking my traffic. The raw stats generated by AwStats say OzzieSport received 4,119 visits, 11,879 page views, 49,011 page views, 82,451 hits in December 2010.     In the context of Hinch’s site, Hinch received 24.25 times the amount of traffic as OzzieSport.com.  Where server statistics falls down is that it suggests much smaller amounts of traffic. The ratio for OzzieSport total hits to total visitors is 20.02. Assuming Hinch’s ratios are similar to OzzieSport’s statistics, Hinch had 99,900 visitors.  Like the recalculation based on hits, this number suggests that Hinch’s traffic is not as high as the 2 million figure would lead one to believe.

Server statistics, for reasons explained above, are generally not viewed as reliable and are not used by most industry people to measure traffic to a site.  The statistic package that is used is Google Analytics.   Sites like Twitter, MySpace, answers.com, dailymotion.com and myYearbook.com all have Google Analytics installed. (Google Analytics, 2011, January 17). As of June 2010, an estimated ” 23.48% of Alexa’s 10,000 most popular websites” have Google Analytics installed. (The Biggest Google Analytics Sites, 2010, June 3) Google Analytics works by using ” a first-party cookie and JavaScript code to collect information about visitors.” (How does Google Analytics work? – Analytics Help, 2011).  Hinch does not have Google Analytics installed.  Given that, rough estimates need to be made regarding how much traffic he may have gotten using known variables.  In this case, Google Analytics data and server data are available for OzzieSport.  OzzieSport’s Google Analytics data is found in Figure 2.

Figure 2. OzzieSport.com’s Google Analytics information for December 2010.

Where Ozzie had 4,119 visitors according to server data , OzzieSport had 1,744 visitors according to Google Analytics.  The server statistics recorded 2.36 times more visitors than Google Analytics.   Using these numbers as a base and assuming that Hinch had 99,900 server recorded visits, Hinch had an estimated 42,330 visitors that would have been counted by Google Analytics.  Using the same OzzieSport numbers, Hinch had an estimated 1250000 page views according on his server.  Using OzzieSport’s server to Google Analytics ratio, Hinch had 78,616 page views.

The data suggests the Hinch’s website likely had around 42,000 visitors and 79,000 page views.  Hinch’s numbers may be accurate in terms of how many hits he received to his website but are misleading when compared to the industry standard count of Google Analytics.

The second purpose of this chapter is to determine the level of Hinch’s traffic compared to Wikipedia. In order to do this, the total article views needs to be determined for the period between December 20 and December 28.  To determine this, statistics were gathered at http://stats.grok.se/ for the St Kilda Saints, Nick Riewoldt, Zac Dawson, Sam Gilbert and Nick Dal Santo articles.  This data can be found in Table 1.

Table 1
St Kilda related Wikipedia article total views

When the total increased article views are added together, the result is 30,501. Derryn Hinch’s page views has been estimated at 79,000. Wikipedia’s totals are less than half of Hinch’s. This suggests that more people turned to Hinch for news about the St Kilda nude photo controversy than people turned to Wikipedia.

In conclusion, Hinch’s 2 million number is misleading in that it is derived from an industry standard number.  It was corrected for, arriving at a number of around 42,000 visitors and 79,000 page views from December 1 to December 28. During the major part of the controversy, more total people turned to Derryn Hinch and his website than people turned to Wikipedia for information when total page/article views is the measure.  When controversy happens, sport fans still turn to traditional media presented by journalists online.

References

• The Biggest Google Analytics Sites. (2010, June 3). Backend Battles. Retrieved January 17, 2011, from http://www.backendbattles.com/backend/Google_Analytics

• Derryn Hinch. (2010, December 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:09, January 16, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derryn_Hinch&oldid=404599662

• Google Analytics. (2011, January 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:53, January 17, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Analytics&oldid=408298655

• Hinch, D. (2010, September 21). The Response…. Derryn Hinch – My Liver, My Life. Blog, . Retrieved January 16, 2011, from http://liverblog.hinch.net/the-response/

• Hinch, D. (2010, December 24). Hinch delves deeper into scandal. 3AW693 News Talk. Radio. Retrieved December 27, 2010, from http://www.3aw.com.au/blogs/blog-with-derryn-hinch/hinch-delves-deeper-into-scandal/20101224-196xc.html

• Hinch, D. (2010, December 28). Your number’s up. HINCH.net – The Official Derryn Hinch Website. Retrieved December 29, 2010, from http://www.hinch.net/hinch-says-2010/December/28-12-10.html

• Hinch, D. (2010, December 29). A stern reply. HINCH.net – The Official Derryn Hinch Website. Retrieved December 29, 2010, from http://www.hinch.net/hinch-says-2010/December/28-12-10.html

• Hinch, D. (2011, January 14). One last time. HINCH.net – The Official Derryn Hinch Website. Retrieved January 16, 2011, from http://hinch.net/hinch-says-2011/January/14-01-11.html

• How does Google Analytics work? – Analytics Help. (2011). Google. Retrieved January 17, 2011, from http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55539

• Rebecca. (2010, March 22). Derryn Hinch – longtime campaigner against sexual abuse. BlueBec.Com. Blog. Retrieved January 16, 2011, from http://blogs.bluebec.com/derryn_hinch/

• van den Berg, L. (2010, September 21). Derryn Hinch reveals cancer battle on radio. Herald Sun. Newspaper. Retrieved January 16, 2011, from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/derryn-hinch-reveals-cancer-battle/story-e6frf7jo-1225926878533

• Woolveridge, R. (2005, May 19). Hinch hammered for believing Corby guilty. Sydney Morning Herald. Newpaper. Retrieved January 16, 2011, from http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Hinch-hammered-for-believing-Corby-guilty/2005/05/19/1116361653718.html

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Part 1: Nick Dal Santo, Part 2: Zac Dawson, Part 3: Nick Riewoldt

St Kilda Saints

St Kilda has been at the heart of this controversy. Its players have been splashed in print in publications like the Melbourne’s Herald Sun with photographs of players in their St Kilda jumpers. The girl at the heart of the scandal has been branded as the “St Kilda Girl.” (Herald Sun Editorial Staff, 2010, December 29) When the scandal involving the girl broke in June, St Kilda was implicated in ways its player were not with the press referring to the situation involving two unnamed St Kilda players. (Sheahan, 2010, May 27) (Newstalk ZB, 2010, May 27) (Riley, 2010, May 30) These links between alleged victim, players, club and league continued on as the story broke again with the release of pictures in late December. (Dowsley, 2010, December 21) (Phelan, 2010, December 20) (AAP, 2010, December 21)

Dating back to May, there were two narratives, two perspectives being put forth both by the media and fans. There was the perspective of the players, St Kilda Saints and the AFL, and there was the perspective of the teenaged girl. Back them, columnists like Riley (2010, May 30) of the Herald Sun took the side of the teenaged girl. This battle of two perspectives, of who did what, whom was guilty and who was to blame extended into December, when the pictures were released. People again took sides. Singh, (2010, December 28) a journalism student at the University of Sydney, had her editorial in support of the teenaged girl posted on The Age’s website. The Herald Sun editorial staff took the side of the players and club, citing the invasion of privacy as part of their rationale, saying that “The best outcome may be for the girl to apologise for what she has done and accept counselling.” (Herald Sun Editorial Staff, 2010, December 29)

As the story wound down in the media, it was continuing to gain traction with a number of social media activists claiming that St Kilda had victimized the girl, that the league and club were engaging in misogyny in their attempts to keep their all important female and family friendly audience (PQ, 2010, December 28) (Hinch, 2010, December 29) and perception of superiority over rugby league because of their moral superiority. (Tedeschi, 2010, December 23) There were allegations that AFL and St Kilda or their supporters were “astroturfing,” trying to derail legitimate conversations about the scandal in order to silence critics of the league, team and players. (Foale, 2010, December 31) There were claims that the AFL and St Kilda were behaving like bullies, who sought to destroy the reputation of a 17 year old girl in order to protect their own reputations. (Kim, 2010, December 28) Derryn Hinch posted several blog entries critical of the AFL and St Kilda’s actions. Links to these posts were shared on social networking sites like Twitter. People following the controversy could and did keep up with new blog posts and the discussion by following the #dickilieaks hashtag. The message shared in some of the blog posts was one that clearly painted St Kilda in an unfavorable light:

The comparison to Vatican cover-ups of sex abuse seems more and more apt. As with the Catholic Church, the institution of AFL football has lost its moral bearings over Dickileaks in the scramble to protect its reputation from outside attack. And, like the Vatican, the Saints (and the AFL and its flunkies in the media) become complicit in the crimes they seek to cover up. (PQ, 2010, December 28)

After having held a press conference on December 21 and responded to media requests, St Kilda and its spokespeople became mostly silent on the topic by December 24, 2010. They did not subsequently mention the controversy on their Twitter account again and, as of December 31, there was only one reference to the controversy on their home page. After December 24, the official method for handling continued discussion appeared to be silence and ignoring it.

It is against this backdrop that the impact of controversy on St Kilda needs to be examined as the Internet played a key role in the distribution of pictures, publicity regarding that dissemination, why the mainstream Australian sport media picked up the story, and the refusal of the story to die despite the club’s silence. This section will explore the impact that the St Kilda nude photo controversy has had on the club’s fanbase and try to determine if the story will have an impact beyond the team to the league. This will be done by looking at behavior by fans and non-fans as it pertains to St Kilda and the AFL in the period prior to the release of the photos, in the period between December 20 and December 25 when the story had the most media play, and the period between December 26, 2010 and January 1, 2011 when the story largely continued unreported on social media sites like Twitter and on blogs like Derryn Hinch’s website. Alexa website rankings and demographics will be looked at. Facebook demographics and fan page growth will also be explored. Wikipedia article views will be looked at to determine if readers connected players to the league and the team. Twitter will be looked at from the perspective of keyword and hashtag usage, changes in location patterns in response to the controversy, how the team and league’s Twitter followers differed from the girl at the heart of the controversy, and growth patterns for the official accounts compared to other teams in the league. Smaller social networks and websites will be looked at to see if the controversy caused any movement or new activity on them for the AFL or the Saints. These networks include bebo, BlackPlanet, delicious, digg, ebay, LiveJournal and YouTube. Google New’s chart tracking mentions of the story will be looked at to provide additional context for media interest. IceRocket, a site that tracks blogs, will also be looked at in order to compare interest in teams across the blogosphere. When all these things are looked at as part of one picture, it should become clear as to how the club and the league were impacted by this latest scandal.

Google News.
Google provides many charts and ways to visualize information on the content found in its archives and how users try to access that content.  One such visual tool that Google provides shows how many news story were posted around a specific event and the total number of stories posted by date.   For this controversy, Google News grouped articles around two stories. The first grouping is around Riewoldt and the nude photos with the chart available in Figure 4.  The second grouping involves the teenaged girl and the chart is in Figure 5.

Figure 4. Google News total story count for Riewoldt pictures.

Figure 5. Google News total story count for teenaged girl.

These Google News charts confirm that the story started around December 19, when the girl announced her intended actions on Facebook and Twitter, picked up a huge amount steam in the media very late on December 20, early on December 21, peaking again later on December 21 after Riewoldt gave his press conference. The picture story was done in the media by December 23. The first peak on the teenaged girl aspect of the story peaked when the media and the AFL launched an attack on the girl’s credibility and peaked again late on December 23, early on December 24 when the media began to question attacks on the girl. The teenaged girl story then ended largely ended by early on December 25. This data supports the author’s observations and assumptions in this paper regarding media coverage of the story.

IceRocket.

IceRocket is a blog search engine. One of the search tools IceRocket provides is a way to visualize the total number of blog posts by day for the past 30 days that mention user inputted keywords. Like the Google News charts, IceRocket’s charts provide another way of viewing how the scandal played out. IceRocket’s search results pull from a different content type, blogs, that do not include as much media coverage. Instead, it could be said that IceRocket represents a wider perspective based on Australian and international bloggers. “St Kilda”, “Australian Football League”, Nick Riewoldt, Zac Dawson and Nick Dal Santo were searched for and the resulting graph can be found in Figure 6.

Figure 6. IceRocket trends chart.

Like Google News, the story appeared to peak in the period between December 20 and December 24, 2010. The number of mentions at the height of the controversy was not much greater than a peak around December 9. The difference is that the peak lasted longer during the period of the controversy. The other difference is that discussion of players peaked during the later period, while the peak did not around December 9. There appears to have been a second smaller peak related to the controversy around December 26, which coincides with Twitter data referenced later in the St Kilda section. Blog posting volume related to St Kilda immediately dropped on the 27th of December before increasing again. After the 26th of December, discussion of the three players continued at a rate elevated from the pre-controversy period. Against the backdrop of the Google News data, this suggests that interest in the St Kilda nude photo controversy continued even after media interest dropped off.

Twitter.

Twitter played a central role in this the St Kilda nude photo controversy, with a large part of the public discussion taking place on the network. It is through Twitter that some journalists like Derryn Hinch have been promoting their continued coverage, coverage that their own media outlets won’t publish, of the St Kilda story. It is also the platform that the teenaged girl at the heart of the controversy interacts with journalists and others on, helping to further her own narrative involvement. There are many ways to look at Twitter. One way is to look at who is tweeting about the controversy using the popular controversy related #dickileaks hashtag and what those users have tweeted about sport wise prior to this. Another way is to look at the volume of tweets being posted about the controversy using the #dickileaks hashtag. A third way to look at the controversy is to use a venn diagram to see what sort of associations people are making when they tweet about parties involved in the controversy. A fourth way to look at the controversy is to look at the differences between followers of the AFL, St Kilda and the teenaged girl at the heart of the controversy. A last way to examine the impact of the controversy on Twitter is to compare the growth patterns of St Kilda against other teams in the league and to examine the growth of followers for the AFL against other Australian sport leagues.

TwapperKeeper is an application that allows users to archive tweets across the whole of Twitter based on keyword and hashtags. One a user a notebook for keywords and hashtags, Twapper Keeper plugs into Twitter’s API and attempts to pull the last 1,500 tweets from search. (FAQ, 2010, October 27) The archives are than accessible to several applications that allow for tweets to easily be analyzed. Prior to December 29, 2010, the author had created 121 archives for tags and keywords related to Australian sport. On that date, notebooks were created for #dickilieaks and #dikileaks. On December 30, notebooks were created for Nick Dal Santo, Nick Riewoldt, #skfc, #stkilda and @stkildafc. On December 31, notebooks were created for #dalsanto and #riewoldt.

One application that TwapperKeeper powers is Summarizr. Summarizr tracks the total number of tweets for a hashtag or keyword, total number of people who Tweeted it, total hashtags found in those Tweets, top ten people who Tweeted that hashtag, top ten @ replies including that hashtag, top ten conversations between people involving that hashtag, and top ten urls mentioned in Tweets including that hashtag.

The people who tweeted, were recipients of @ replies and engaged in conversations is one of the most important pieces of information that Summarizr provides. #dickileaks was the hashtag adopted by critics of the controversy early during the stage involving the photos being released. The top ten people across various categories can give an idea as the relative interest the participants had in the AFL prior to and during this controversy based on the other archives there were included in. The top ten tweeters of this tag as of the morning of January 1, 2011 were AuxiliaryEgo (90), AnthonyQLD (45), Blackmask_13 (44), JanetJane89 (40), MsMirf (37), tradrmum (37), Ian__P (31), fishcoteque (29), NakedSaints (27), and yamiexup (26). The top ten recipients were HumanHeadline (292), CatherineDeveny (123), Its_K_Isabella (121), mikestuchbery (72), MichaelByrnes (59), LeslieCannold (56), aussiejustice (53), MsMirf (45), AuxiliaryEgo (40) and AnthonyQLD (34). The top ten people conversations with pairs of Twitter users using this tag were (12) Blackmask_13 <--> MsMirf (9), (5) MsMirf <--> tradrmum (10), (13) AnthonyQLD <--> Its_K_Isabella (1), (5) mollyfud <--> tradrmum (3), (3) AnthonyQLD <--> MsMirf (5), (3) cyclingscotty <--> tradrmum (5), (5) MsMirf <--> rob_jj (2), (3) Blackmask_13 <--> mollyfud (4), (2) mollyfud <--> SharpContrast (4), and (4) aussiebluejade <--> pauldwilkie (1). With the exception of @Ian__P, @mikestuchbery and @MichaelByrnes , the rest of the Twitter users on that list only appeared in the #afl notebook or did not appear in any other sort related notebooks found on TwapperKeeper. The lack of the most active users of the #dickileaks tag using other Australian sport related tags suggests that the outrage came from outside the AFL and St Kilda’s existing fanbase. This can be perceived as a positive for the AFL and St Kilda in that they did not offend their existing fanbase. It can also be perceived as a negative for the AFL and St Kilda as it likely will make it more difficult for the both to grow their fanbases.

Another tool that can be used to analyze Twitter hashtag usage is What the Hashtag?!. Like Sumarizr, it provides statistics regarding hashtag usage. One statistic it provides is the total count of tweets using a #hashtag for each day of the last seven. The total uses for #dickileaks for the period between December 25 and December 31 on What the Hashtag?! were available on the site. A graph of this data can be found in Figure 6.

Figure 7. What the Hashtag?! screenshot for #dickileaks

This chart shows that interest in the scandal, using this hashtag, peaked on December 28, a few days after the media had gone silent on the story. December 31′s hashtag usage total was only 6 less than the total for December 26. Based on this hashtag alone, this suggests that Twitter interest in the controversy peaked later than media and blogger interest as expressed in the Google News and IceRocket graphs.

Another tool available to do an analysis of the content of Tweets involving the controversy is TwitterVenn. TwitterVenn creates Venn diagrams based on keywords that a user selects. The service uses Twitter’s search API to find Tweets that mention the two or three teams the user selected, determines if the terms were used together or independently, counts the total Tweets and then creates the Venn. (Clark, 2010) TwitterVenn’s usage of Twitter’s search API suggests that it can only pull the 1,500 most recent Tweets for each of the keywords searched for. Figure 8 shows the total references to St Kilda, AFL and dickileaks as they pertain to each other.

This Venn suggests that more people Tweeting about the controversy associated the scandal with the AFL than they associated it with St Kilda. If this is true, it suggests that the scandal may have longer-term consequences for the AFL in terms of reaching new audiences than St Kilda has. The good news for the AFL though is that there is a lot of discussion involving the league and comparatively little of it involves the scandal or the St Kilda Saints; most people tweeting about the topic aren’t doing so involving an AFL damaging hashtag.

While content analysis provides some insight into how people think about a topic, more useful data may involve who follows a topic, what people are happy to have others know who they follow, who people identify with in terms of who they follow. One way of processing that information is to compare the people on Twitter that follow the major parties involved in this controversy: the teenaged girl, the St Kilda Saints and the AFL. Follower data for all three was gathered using ozfollowers.pl, a script found in Appendix 5. The teenaged girl data was gathered on December 28, 2010. The AFL and St Kilda Saints data was gathered on December 26. Once this done, the total followers by city was calculated, along with the mean, median and mode for total followers, friends, list appearances and status updates for all followers of those three accounts. This data is available in Table 7.

Table 7
Teenaged Girl, St Kilda, AFLStatistics for Twitter Followers

This data suggests that each party involved in the controversy has its own unique audience. Followers for the teenaged girl do not appear on many lists, they follow fewer people than the AFL and Saints and are followed by more people than the AFL. Her followers are less active than Saints fans but more active than AFL fans. Based on this data, if all three parties were to post a message on Twitter, the girl and the AFL would have a better chance of their message being received than the Saints. The girl’s audiences updates and likely reads her. That is probably worth knowing and may explain why the Saints and AFL attempted to discredit her: Her audience can easily listen to her.

Another way of looking at follower data is to compare what cities each account’s followers come from. This data is picked up when OzFollowers.pl is run. The program looks at the user inputted location and compares that to a list of human and machine generated conversions to city, state and country. Once this was done, the total followers by city for each account were tabulated. Table 8 shows the top ten follower cities by account.

Table 8
Total Followers for girl, St Kilda, AFL by City

The girl has a larger audience in Melbourne than the Saints. She has many more followers than the AFL and Saints have in Sydney. Aside from that city, she does not have more followers than the AFL in any of their respective top ten. The girl has more followers than St Kilda has in every city on the list of top ten cities. That the girl’s popularity by city tracks well with the AFL and Saints; it is not a good sign for either organization. The matching rank of popularity by city confirms national interest in the story. Interest in the controversy was not contained to a small geographic area around where the girl was from or Melbourne where the media appeared to give the story the most attention; interest paralleled the AFL’s market on Twitter.

Twitter follower location data can also be looked at from the perspective of Australian state. The script that gathers locations can fill in country and state information if the location field is blank or is determined to be unknown. It does this by using the time zone field. Twitter’s time zones for Australia are state, not time zone specific. This means that there are fewer unknowns on that level. The totals can be visualized in Figure 9.

Figure 9 . Twitter Followers for Girl, St Kilda and AFL by Australian State.

With the exception of New South Wales, the follower totals by state mirror that of the top ten total followers by city. New South Wales differs because there are more followers in New South Wales for the girl than there is for the AFL: 1080 to 952. The difference is 128. The AFL has an expansion team planned for the Sydney area that will join the league in 2012. Negative associations for the AFL in the New South Wales are especially problematic for them if they hope the team will be successful. If locals associate the league with the actions of St Kilda’s organizational response and the player’s alleged treatment toward the girl, this could have far-reaching and negative consequences.

Overall, Twitter suggests that the results are not ideal when it comes to how users reacted to the controversy. The most popular people discussing the controversy using the #dickileaks tag did not appear to be fans of the league, not having participated in other on Twitter conversations featuring Australian sport related hashtags. While the team and the league may have started to ignore the controversy by the 24th of December, Twitter users continued to discuss it with peak usage for the #dickileaks hashtag happening on December 28, 2010. More people were using the #dickileaks hashtag in connection with the AFL than they were using it in connection with the Saints, signaling that participants connected the players to league wide attitudes rather connecting it to institutional problems inside a single club. The follower statistics for the girl, St Kilda and the AFL suggest that of the three, the girl has more ready access to the audience that follows her because they update frequently and follow fewer people than St Kilda; this means they are more likely to see her on message tweets than St Kilda followers are. The girl has more followers in every city of the top ten cities she is popular in than St Kilda. This reinforces the idea that St Kilda’s ability to share its message to current and future fan base is difficult because the girl has greater reach in those cities. When looking at follower data by state, there appear to be institutional problems for the AFL as the girl has more followers than in New South Wales than the AFL does. If New South Wales’s potential fans make the connection between football players and sex, this may make it harder for the AFL to market the GWS Giants because of negative associations. The ability for the AFL and St Kilda to reach a new market on Twitter as a result of this controversy was likely severely damaged.

References

• AAP. (2010, December 21). St Kilda AFL skipper Nick Riewoldt says he’s disappointed teammate didn’t delete photo. The Australian. Newspaper. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/st-kilda-afl-skipper-nick-riewoldt-says-hes-disappointed-teammate-didnt-delete-photo/story-e6frg6nf-1225974310838
• Clark, J. (2010). Twitter Venn. Twitter Venn. Retrieved June 11, 2010, from http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterVenn/view.php
• Dowsley, A. (2010, December 21) I want my revenge. Herald Sun. 7. Melbourne.
• Foale, V. (2010, December 31). Astroturfing, #dickileaks and why perception is the key to good PR. Sleepless Nights. Blog . Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://somedaywewillsleep.com/astroturfing-dickileaks-and-why-perception-is-the-key-to-good-pr/
• Herald Sun Editorial Staff. (2010, December 29). Sorry St Kilda pic saga needs to end. Herald Sun. Newspaper. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad-application/sorry-st-kilda-pic-saga-needs-to-end/story-fn6bn88w-1225977455914
• Hinch, D. (2010, December 24). Hinch delves deeper into scandal. 3AW693 News Talk. Radio. Retrieved December 27, 2010, from http://www.3aw.com.au/blogs/blog-with-derryn-hinch/hinch-delves-deeper-into-scandal/20101224-196xc.html
• Hinch, D. (2010, December 28). Your number’s up. HINCH.net – The Official Derryn Hinch Website. Retrieved December 29, 2010, from http://www.hinch.net/hinch-says-2010/December/28-12-10.html
• Hinch, D. (2010, December 29). A stern reply. HINCH.net – The Official Derryn Hinch Website. Retrieved December 29, 2010, from http://www.hinch.net/hinch-says-2010/December/28-12-10.html
• Kim. (2010, December 28). I should publish the photos of the naked St Kilda players as well! Frogpondsrock… Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://frogpondsrock.com/2010/12/i-should-publish-the-photos-of-the-naked-st-kilda-players-as-well/
• Newstalk ZB. (2010, May 27). AFL: St Kilda Players cleared over teen pregnancy claims. TVNZ. Television. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://tvnz.co.nz/othersports-news/afl-clears-players-over-teen-pregnancy-claims-3569286
• Phelan, J. (2010, December 20). Saints granted order. AFL.com.au. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.afl.com.au/news/newsarticle/tabid/208/newsid/106379/default.aspx
• PQ. (2010, December 28). The sad, sad irony of #dickileaks: what women don’t want. TheNewTasman.com. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://irredeemable.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/the-sad-sad-irony-of-dickileaks-what-women-dont-want/
• Riley, R. (2010, May 30). I’m standing up for the schoolgirl. Herald Sun. Newspaper. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion-old/im-standing-up-for-the-schoolgirl/story-fn56b2fi-1225872973213
• Sheahan, M. (2010, May 27). The game called life. Herald Sun. Newspaper. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/the-game-called-life/story-e6frf9ox-1225871768433
• Singh, S. (2010, December 28). Twitter reveals unsettling truths about ‘DikiLeaks’. The Age. Newspaper. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/twitter-reveals-unsettling-truths-about-dikileaks-20101228-198sr.html
• Tedeschi, N. (2010, December 23). A Rugby League View on an AFL Scandal. The Big Tip. Sports blog. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://www.thebigtip.com.au/afl/rugby-league-view-afl-scandal

Related Posts:

• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• A new week, another St Kilda controversy
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 21)
• St Kilda Saints Nude Photo Controversy (complete)

I thought this might be a bit interesting so I decided to post it.  Basically, for the period between November 7 and November 13, I got the daily total for all the keywords that led to OzzieSport.  This data is available from Google Analytics.  For every keyword, I tried to assign a league and a team.  This wasn’t always possible as keywords related to writing a PhD proposal aren’t sport related.  Once that was done, I totaled everything up by team to see which teams and leagues gave me the most search related traffic over the past week.  (This is all entirely subjective in that the SEO work I do/don’t do has a large impact on the findability of my blog.  Ditto for the topics covered. Nonetheless, this is interesting to me.)

Yeah, poor Joel Monaghan. His plight gave me a fairly above average search traffic boost. :/

Related Posts:

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

I feel guilty as I’m kind of posting as I do with out any particular pattern. Anyway, I looked at Google.com.au and friendster (both of which have a load of garbage unrelated results) and recorded the totals for number of results for each team. I also did that bebo, care2 and blogger. (I also did ecademy and blackplanet but results were 0 the whole way through.) I’ll see if I feel like exploring and recording the size of the Perth sport fandom some more. The following table includes the results so far. If you have methodology questions, let me know.

Related Posts:

• Data dump: Australian sport on bebo
• 43things.com and Perth based sport clubs
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)

This post was broken up into multiple posts because there was a lot of rows. It should hopefully be easier to find data/information this way.

ecademy
ecademy is an alternative to LinkedIn.

Facebook
This first set is based on http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/.

This table was designed to look at growth of Socceroos related fan pages.

League	Team	Name	Url	Total members	Type	Date checked	Included in FB2	Official
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	32	741	Page	15-May-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	4	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	0	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	0	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	http://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	41	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	185	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	0	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	http://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Australian University Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-University-Socceroos/279400107713	197	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	86	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	82	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	188	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	84	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	http://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	113	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	20	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	140	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	51	640	Page	28-May-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	59	215	Page	30-May-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	14	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	29	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	11	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	2	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	http://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	98	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	293	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	1	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	http://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	8	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Australian University Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-University-Socceroos/279400107713	203	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	93	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	4	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	83	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	246	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	107	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	http://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	117	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	9	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	24	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	291	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	64	956	Page	1-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	70	261	Page	5-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	71	286	Page	7-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	73	463	Page	10-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	330	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	31	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	48	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	52	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	4	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	http://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	110	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	448	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	3	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	http://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	9	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	93	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	4	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	86	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	337	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	113	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	http://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	117	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	13	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	23	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	http://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	74	987	Page	12-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	335	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	33	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	57	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	53	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	5	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	http://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	113	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	455	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	3	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	http://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	9	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	95	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	4	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	86	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	http://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	342	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	113	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	http://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	117	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	14	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	http://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	23	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No

Foursquare
This is my complete table to date for all venues. It doesn’t necessarily connect to the Socceroos but it is World Cup related data so I’m shoving it in here.

Gaia Online
Another small network…

Gowalla
Same deal as Foursquare…

Google
Search results…

hi5
Need more data overall from this for my other research…

Icerocket
A blog search engine…

Related Posts:

• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Australian sport on ebay
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)

This weekend, the Melbourne Demons are playing the Port Adelaide Power in Darwin.  This game is one of two AFL games being held in Darwin this season.  I’m rather keen on geographic patterns in fan communities.  Where are they located?  How many people are there?  What is the size and interest level in a particular place?  Given that there isn’t an AFL team based in Darwin and the nearest team is team is over 3,000 kms (1,800+miles), it would be hard to figure out what team allegiances would be based on.  (The Canberra game with the Swans had a large number of people who barracked for the Sydney based team.  Canberra’s distance from Sydney and the Swans support of AFL Canberra are probably the major reasons for that.)  I wanted to explore what those loyalties would be in the Northern Territory to the exclusion of other states.

There really is no good way about getting numbers for the Northern Territory with out picking up everyone else across the country.  And even when that isn’t the case, people frequently will list themselves as residing or belonging to the next biggest city even if they don’t reside there.  This is highly problematic when you’re looking to see if there are pockets of team support in the suburbs and rural areas where city affiliation is more important when dealing with a wider, more international audience that may not have heard of Freemantle but may have heard of Perth, or who may not have heard of Geelong but do know where Sydney is.  There are ways to tease those patterns out by removing the major cities, like Melbourne, where the core is very tiny.  And I’m digressing because even when you can do that, it is rather hard to still just get data off major networks about a person’s interest by city, while excluding other states.  I can’t do that on Facebook, LiveJournal and its clones, bebo, blogger, orkut, 43things, LinkedIn, Twitter, care2… the list goes on and on.  There is no easy solution other than getting everyone and then, after the data is collected, filtering it down by state.

While I have a lot of data of that sort already, not many people live in the Northern Territory.  (For the Adelaide Crows, across six networks and with 75 fans, only one is from the Northern Territory.)  It is really hard to get regional patterns inside the Northern Territories.  My solution to try to figure this out was go to Google.com.au, put in the team’s name and the city.  (I got the list of cities I used from a list of postal codes for the Northern Territory on Wikipedia. I was logged out of my Google account.  I did not use the API.) My list of cities was 114 long after I removed cities with multiple postal codes.  City names, when they included more than one word, were put in quotes.  Team names were put in quotes.  An example search with that would be “Melbourne Demons” “Alice Springs”.

This is all fine and dandy.  You can easily repeat the results.  You should be able to get regional patterns on a large scale that you can’t get with maps.google.com.au or video.google.com.au or bebo. Everything theoretically should work to get a some one accurate picture of the interest level by city in the Northern Territory for both teams.  Except, well, no.  Midstream, methodology begins to change.  Things I had not necessarily thought of come in to play.  First, there are duplicate city names.  This is an issue for Palmerston, which is a city in New Zealand, a city in the Northern Territory and a suburb in the Australian Capital Territory.  Second, some cities have common names or share names with people.  This is the case for Gray, Northern Territory.  It is the case for another city that shares a name of a player for a different AFL team.  This issue might be correctable by adding a “Northern Territory” or an NT to the search phrase.  I did this for Palmerston.  I just didn’t do it consistently because Google did not always realize NT meant “Northern Territory” and there were three wildly different search results in some cases.  It becomes just easier to ignore and accept that search results are going to be faulty.  The third major issue was Google spelling.  This issue can be less obvious unless you actually look at the results.  Moil is a city in the Northern Territory.  Google helpfully wanted correct my spelling by pulling up results featuring the word Mobile.  Moil and Mobile are not the same thing.  Karama and Karma are also not the same thing.  Google, if you don’t specifically tell it that these are not the same thing, treats them as if they are.  When I found this, I did correct the results number by putting a + in front of it to force Google to only pull up results with that exactly spelling.  Outside those two examples, I did this for Katherine, Elliott, Farrar, Gray, Gunn, Malak, Millner, Mitchell, The Gardens, and The Narrows. This helped insure slightly more relevance and didn’t create the problems of what is the preferential way to indicate that a city is in the Northern Territory.

The methodology problems out of the way, it is time for the results.  I couldn’t get a good visualization tool.  (The ones I tend to use aren’t really good with the Northern Territory.  I’ll find a fix for that in the future.)  Therefor, the easiest way to see the results is to download the xls file or the csv file.  The results, to me with out the aid of a map, are pretty boring when compared to methodology but still interesting.  On the whole, it looks like there is more interest in the Melbourne Demons than there is in the Port Adelaide Power.  If I give each team a point if they are more popular in a particular city, the Demons easily win the day with 93 to the Power’s 15 and with six cities being tied.  If I add up all the search results (each city gets added.  This number has little relationship to the total pages in the Northern Territory because many pages reference both teams or multiple cities in the Northern Territory), the Demons also win with 114,368 total pages compared to the Power’s 64,191.  The ratio to cities and total pages is not particularly close.  The Power are more popular in 13% of cities and represent 35% of total pages.

The top city for Port Adelaide Power is represented by the following search: “Port Adelaide Power” Driver NT.  Driver is a popular common word so it is highly probable that this is not accurate, even with the attempt to correct for the Northern Territory by adding NT to the search.  The next city that “prefers” the Power based on total search results is Parap, with 839 results.  For the Melbourne Demons, “Melbourne Demons” +Mitchell is the top city.  That’s another problematic place as this is a common surname.  The next most popular city based on total search results for the Melbourne Demons is Yuendumu with 12,200 page results.   What is interesting here is that Darwin and Alice Springs do not appear at the top of the list, even when we exclude Driver and Mitchell.  When the Demons and Power lists are combined and sorted descending by pages per city, Darwin doesn’t appear until the 12th spot for the Demons and 18th sport for the Power.  Alice Spring doesn’t appear until 32 for the Demons and 39th position for the Power.  The biggest population bases in the territory are not generating the most references for either teams.

I’m not entirely certain why “big” cities don’t rank higher.  Are all the cities ahead of them problematic with their names where steps were not taken to correct for that?  Or is it possible that more rural fans are reliant on the Internet to express their fannishness for a team?  Are there players from these rural communities playing in the AFL so local news sources give additional attention to players that they would not get in more urban areas?  It is possible.  The real reason is probably rather complex.

So if you’re going to the game in Darwin this weekend, you probably see more people barracking for the Demons.

Notes:

1. I could theoretically get data from Facebook’s advertiser page for the number of people who list an interest and live with in a certain distance of a city.  There are just a few limitations.  First, not every location in the Northern Territory is listed.  Second, since Facebook forced users to like their interests, things have been in a state of flux and I’ve found zeros where there should not be zeros based on the number of people who like a fan page that Facebook uses and its default for a search of that interest.

2.  There are other ways I might have gone about doing this besides Google, including searching local newspapers for references to a team.  There are just limitations there in that not every location has its own newspaper and it excludes a lot of fan created references on sites likes bebo and blogger where the audience may be different than the ones that newspapers market to.  I might also have tried a geolocation based search.  I just haven’t found a good one yet that is based in Australia.  And even the ones I have seen tend to focus on Twitter and Foursquare.  AFL fandom is located more than just there.

3.  The methodology problems are a recurring problem when doing any sort of social media or web based research with the intent to create data sets.  It is why I’m generally deeply skeptical of any numbers I see unless some one clearly states their methodology, explains the problems and provides their data to give benchmarks.  This methodology issue also probably explains why much of the research done in regards to social media involves case studies and qualitative style research: The data is just so problematic to attain.

Edited to add: Visualization of this data. It isn’t perfect. There are a number of erroneous data points. (Anything outside of the Northern Territory is incorrectly placed on the map.) That said, it begins to give an idea of these patterns going on… though looking at the map, I don’t really see what I would consider overwhelming patterns. One of the islands is all Melbourne Demons. I had some data for about 15 cities for the North Melbourne Kangaroos that I overlaid to give this a bit more perspective. At some point, I should do every city in the Northern Territory, corrected as much as possible for the problems discussed above, with every team on the map.

Related Posts:

• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Australian sport on ebay
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)

This is a quick data dump post.  I know who Jason Akermanis is because I saw him play this past weekend in Canberra.  I’ve been told he has a tendency to open his mouth and speak frankly in such a way that his previous club didn’t like him.  Thus, it was apparently not that surprising that he opened his mouth and offended people today.  I may or may not be interested in writing about him and the response to his comments at a later date.  It will come down to time and interest.  Still, benchmarks in case I do and data dumping now for those who might want to write an analysis that I’m not keen to write right now.

Google data

This data was retrieved between 6pm and 7pm on May 20, 2010 Canberra time.   It was retrieved using manual screen scraping.  (I visited each page and copy and pasted the number.)  I was not logged in to any account at the time to prevent my previous searches from influencing the numbers.  The API was not used.  The SE stands for search engine that was used to get the number.  (There are sometimes differences between .com and .com.au.) The Jason story is beginning to circulate but doesn’t appear to be widely picked up outside the metro areas so far. I added a by city component because I find geographic patterns interesting.

Facebook

Before I did Google, I looked at Facebook.  This was done between 5:30 and 6:00pm Canberra time on May 20, 2010.  The Jason situation had already hit Facebook as there was a Facebook group dedicated to being unhappy with Jason by that time.  I found these fan pages by searching for him.  I did not include people or groups in this sample.  None of these pages appear to be officially connected to either the AFL, the Western Bulldogs or Jason Akermanis.

I’m going to speculate that two of those are likely to see an increase in membership over the next couple of days.  How large an increase, I do not yet know and do not feel comfortable speculating about.

After that, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to benchmark the Facebook groups. These can be easy to create. When I looked, there turned out to be a number of them dedicated to Jason, some of which were created in response to the situation. As I have no previous benchmarks, I can’t tell when some of the larger groups were created. Still, this is where the groups about Jason stand now.