Archive for category Twitter

One last #ausvotes Twitter election related map : Labor vs. Liberal

Posted by Laura on Friday, 20 August, 2010

Before I went to bed, I wanted one last Australian related election post. This post draws on the data and methodology from my other posts and maps.

At around 6pm, I did four additional keyword searches on Searchtastic beyond the ones in my most recent post. These were: #ausvotes, #donttrustabbott, #nocleanfeeds, #electionwire. I added them to my complete list of Tweets, then filtered the tweets based on username, location and tweet to remove duplicate tweets. This brought the total of 60,0084 Tweets down to 54,962. I then added three columns: City, State, Country. For the next few hours, I endeavored to fill in as many city fields as I could. The focus was on identifying Australian cities. Thus, for countries not Australia, I just listed the country or unknown. This was so I knew to ignore those. At 8pm, I stopped completing the fields. I just don’t have time to label everything…

Of those 54,962 tweets, some form of identification was completed for 34,213 tweets or 62% of all tweets. (Not a bad sample size from the whole.) Of these tweets, 19,165 came from Australia. Of these, 15,629 have Australian cities identified for the location of the Tweet. That I can play with.

The next step is to identify noise of Liberal, Labor and the Greens by city. The following CONTAINS filters were created on Excel to find tweets to get location data: Labor OR Gillard, Abbott OR Liberal, Brown or Greens. There were 1207, 977 and 302 tweet locations respectively. After this, the total number of Tweets per city for those terms was counted. There were 61 cities with Labor tweets, 62 cities with Liberal tweets, 38 cities with Green tweets.

After this was done, city locations were geocoded for mapping. I like to use BatchGeo. This gives me Latitude and Longitude which make the dots on the map locate more accurately. The tables were then ported over to Geocommons Maker and the following map was generated.

View full map

In table form, this map looks like:

City States Country Labor Count Liberal Count Green Count
Adelaide South Australia Australia 56 66 6
Alice Springs Northern Territory Australia 1 1 1
Ballarat Victoria Australia 2 1 1
Bathurst New South Wales Australia 1
Bayside Victoria Australia 4 2
Beechworth Victoria Australia 1 1 1
Bellingen New South Wales Australia 1
Blacktown New South Wales Australia 47 54 6
Blue Mountains New South Wales Australia 3
Boroondara Victoria Australia 1
Bowen Hills Queensland Australia 1
Brisbane Queensland Australia 71 69 16
Brunswick West New South Wales Australia 1 1
Bunbury Western Australia Australia 11 8 1
Bundaberg Queensland Australia 1
Burwood New South Wales Australia 3
Cairns Queensland Australia 2 3
Canberra Australian Capital Territory Australia 62 63 33
Carlton Victoria Australia 21 11 21
Chittaway Bay New South Wales Australia 1
Clay Wells South Australia Australia 1
Clovelly New South Wales Australia 1 1
Coffs Harbour New South Wales Australia 1 1
Cremorne New South Wales Australia 1
Darwin Northern Territory Australia 2 1
Enmore New South Wales Australia 2 4
Footscray Victoria Australia 1 1
Fremantle Western Australia Australia 2 2
Geelong Victoria Australia 1 2 2
Gold Coast Queensland Australia 107 37 2
Gordon New South Wales Australia 1
Gosford New South Wales Australia 7 1
Goulburn New South Wales Australia 1 1
Hastings Victoria Australia 7 1
Hobart Tasmania Australia 8 10 7
Illawarra New South Wales Australia 1 1
Indooroopilly Queensland Australia 1
Ipswich Queensland Australia 1
Joondalup Western Australia Australia 1
Katoomba New South Wales Australia 1
Kellyville Ridge New South Wales Australia 2
Kuranda Queensland Australia 1 1 1
Launceston Tasmania Australia 1 2
Lithgow New South Wales Australia 1
Mackay Queensland Australia 5 3 2
Macleod Victoria Australia 1
Mallala South Australia Australia 1
Matraville New South Wales Australia 1
Melbourne Victoria Australia 195 188 63
Mitt New South Wales Australia 1 1
Moe Victoria Australia 1
Mount Druitt New South Wales Australia 3 3
Mt. Isa Queensland Australia 1
Newcastle New South Wales Australia 33 20 9
Newtown New South Wales Australia 1 1 1
North Melbourne Victoria Australia 2 3 1
North Sydney New South Wales Australia 10 4 1
Northcote Victoria Australia 1
Orange New South Wales Australia 2
Parkville Victoria Australia 1 1
Perth Western Australia Australia 157 70 12
Point Cook Victoria Australia 1
Port Macquarie New South Wales Australia 13 5 3
Prahran Victoria Australia 1
Quakers Hill New South Wales Australia 1
Randwick New South Wales Australia 1
Redcliffe Queensland Australia 1 1
Ringwood Victoria Australia 2 1
Robina Queensland Australia 1
Rockhampton Queensland Australia 2 2
Sassafras Victoria Australia 1
Shellharbour New South Wales Australia 1
Shoalhaven New South Wales Australia 3
South Morang Victoria Australia 1
Spence Australian Capital Territory Australia 1
St Leonards Victoria Australia 1
St. Kilda Victoria Australia 1
Strathfield New South Wales Australia 1 3
Sunshine Coast Queensland Australia 4
Surry Hills New South Wales Australia 1
Sydney New South Wales Australia 336 298 87
Torquay Victoria Australia 1
Townsville Queensland Australia 1 1 1
Vermont Victoria Australia 1 1
Wagga Wagga New South Wales Australia 1
Windsor Queensland Australia 1
Wolli Creek New South Wales Australia 1 1
Wollongong New South Wales Australia 4 3 1
Woodside South Australia Australia 3

Related Posts:

Twitter #hashtags and the Australian election

Posted by Laura on Thursday, 19 August, 2010

Can you learn about an election by its Twitter #hashtags ? I’m curious to see if the #hashtag use on Twitter matches with what people see as the major issues that the newspapers and news media covered. (I’m also interested in seeing what #hashtags they ReTweeted but that will likely have to wait for another post.) There are a couple of challenges when doing something like this… and be wary of anyone not spelling out their methodology because if you don’t know their methods, you can’t fairly evaluate their results and subsequent conclusions. Social media research is very much creative research that takes place in the moment. While you may not ever be able to get the exact same results, when you repeat a person’s methodology, deviations should be explainable. Anyway, the challenges and assumptions with doing a #hashtag analysis of the Australian elections include:

  • Incomplete tweet set for keywords: I only get what is available from Searchtastic.
  • Incomplete tweet set based on keyword limitations: Even supposing I could get all the tweets related to a keyword, I can’t find every reference to the Australian elections as there are too many possible words that could reference the elections and all the candidates running nation wide.
  • Incomplete tweet set because of time: Some keywords were searched for earlier and some later. Not all keywords were looked at over the same period.
  • Irrelevant tweets: Keywords like #greens may refer to the Green Party in the United States. Liberals may refer to American or British liberals. Unless every tweet is examined, irrelevant tweets will remain in the data set.

To offset some of these problems, a large data set was acquired. (Because a lot of people are tweeting about the elections. I see way more election tweets than footy tweets.) These tweets were acquired using Searchtastic and the following keyword set: #Abbott, #alp, #alp vote, #arbib, #aus2010, #AusLabor, #ausvotes, #ausvotes abbott, #ausvotes gillard, #boatphone, #GILLARDTINED, #greens, #laborfail, #masterchef abbott, #masterchef debate, #masterchef election, #masterchef gillard, #myliberal, #nocleanfeed , #NPC, #ozvote, #qanda, #spill, #tcot, #workchoices, @AustralianLabor, @LiberalAus, @TonyAbbottMHR , abbott math, Abbott-Gillard, asylum boat, australia vote, canberra election, debate abbott, debate gillard, debate winner, Following: @JuliaGillard, Following: @SenatorBobBrown, Following: @TonyAbbottMHR, Gillard, greens brown, Greens Canberra, greens election, Gruen Report, Gruen transfer, hockey liberals, immigration australia, Julia Gillard, JuliaGillard, Krudd Labor, KRudd Liberals, Labor darwin, labor leaks, Labor Liberals, Labor Tasmania, Liberals Tasmania, libs abbott, libs darwin, Libs Howard, marginal electorate, marginal seats, NSWLabor, perth vote, preferences vote, Rudd Liberals, Sex Party, stimulus liberals, sydney elections, Tony Abbott, tony boat phone, tonyabbottmhr, Truss LNP, Truss nationals, Warren Truss, Work Choices Australia, WorkChoices .

These keywords represent the major parties and candidates, some of the major issues, #hashtags that I saw on my Twitter feed, and different geographic areas around the country. Searches were run between July 19 and August 19. A total of 57,977 tweets were collected. The elections were called on July 17. To make sure that the collection of tweets pertain to the elections, all tweets made before July 1 were removed from the data set. (Methodology: Sort tweets by date on Excel. Remove those tweets not between those dates.) By then, everyone knew the elections had to be called and conversation regarding them had started. This takes the total tweets in the data set down to 21,071. That’s still a fairly large collection of tweets to work from. The next step is to remove duplicate tweets from the data set. (On Excel, Data -> Filter -> Advanced Filter -> Unique records only.) This brings the total tweets down to 18,462. That’s still a lot of tweets.

The next step is to extract #hashtags. To do this, I copy and pasted all the tweets to Notepad. I ran a find and replace for [space]# and replaced with [tab]#. I copy and pasted these back, removed all cells that did not start with a #. After this was done, the data set was copy and pasted back to Notepad. Another find and replace was done, this time, [space] was replaced with [tab]. This was pasted back to excel and all cells that did not start with # were deleted. When this was done, 33,857 total hashtags were found. Symbols like , ! . – ? were removed from those #hashtags. This was done to make that #labor. and #labor were treated the same for counting purposes.

A list of unique hashtags was then attained of which there were 2,678. The following table includes all #hashtags that appeared 250 or more times on the list:

Tweet Count
#tcot 5157
#ausvotes 2449
#tlot 1816
#p2 1761
#teaparty 1704
#GOP 1172
#ocra 950
#Libertarian 920
#News 867
#ucot 705
#politics 687
#Israel 536
#sgp 536
#iamthemob 367
#jcot 308
#roft 304
#qanda 303
#cdnpoli 293
#Twisters 261
#USA 209
#Obama 194
#MyLiberal 187
#debate 183
#flotilla 171
#Gaza 155
#masterchef 154
#energy 149
#hhrs 147
#green 134
#rpn 121
#912 111
#aus2010 111
#NPC 108
#rootyq 101
#AUSlabor 95
#oilspill 94
#topprog 94
#nocleanfeed 92
#fb 88
#rightriot 80
#laborfail 79
#spill 76
#US 76
#jews 75
#ALP 74
#terrorism 74
#Greens 72
#cspj 70
#tpp 70
#BP 69
#antisemitism 68
#Gillard 67
#p21 67
#openinternet 66
#FF 65
#FollowFriday 65
#oil 65
#Muslim 64
#ireland 63
#Abbott 62
#UK 61
#Australia 58
#Iran 58
#Palin 57
#Blog 55
#Europe 54
#quote 54
#dnc 52
#fail 51
#iranelection 51
#jlot 51
#hcr 47
#MentalHealth 47
#justsayin 46
#rs 46
#eco 44
#boatphone 43
#glennbeck 43
#islam 42
#zionism 42
#NBN 41
#palestine 41
#jobs 40
#environment 39
#Autism 36
#Hamas 36
#Health 36
#military 36
#tiot 36
#dem 35
#AZ 34
#Lebanon 34
#vote2010 34
#dems 33
#ausdebate 32
#bonjovi 32
#climate 32
#judaism 32
#lateline 32
#MoFo 32
#videos 32
#foxnews 31
#theview 31
#730report 30
#hasbara 30
#nz 30
#travel 30
#tweetcongress 30
#YWC 30
#conservative 29
#Gulf 29
#patriottweets 29
#AFRICA 28
#ampat 28
#dublin 28
#property 28
#WORLDCUP 28
#beck 27
#Free 27
#IDF 27
#ronpaul 27
#acon 26
#jewish 26
#twibbon 26
#bds 25
#CNN 25
#Obamacare 25
#rush 25

Looking at this list, there are some phrases that are likely not Australian or not uniquely Australian. This includes #tcot, which stands for Top Conservatives On Twitter. The term was amongst those searched for because it appeared in a few tweets that also included the #ausvotes #hashtag. A google search for #tcot #ausvotes only brings up 8,120, which further supports the idea that this isn’t really an Australian election term. #tlot was not deliberately searched for in terms of trying to include it. If you put #tlot #ausvotes into a google search, you get 244,000 results which suggests heavy Australian usage. You could probably remove #teaparty, #GOP, #Libertarian, #Israel, #Twisters, #USA, #Obama, #flotilla, #Gaza, #912, #oilspill, #US, #jews, #BP, #antisemitism, #oil, #Muslim, #ireland, #UK, #Iran, #Palin, #Europe, #dnc, #cdnpoli, and #iranelection. They are unlikely to do with the Australian elections.

If that’s agreed upon, then it looks like top issues based on #hashtags … the internet and its openness? It doesn’t look like there was any large scale usage of #hashtags around issues. Instead, it appears that #hashtags were used to label tweets that discussed the election, were used to discuss specific candidates and to discuss specific parties. Issue based discussion may have been secondary to Twitter discussion.

And if that’s true, and going further with that idea, it could validate the messaging used by Labor and the Liberals to largely mount attacks on each other. People on Twitter are heavily engaged in discussing politics but not the issues. It may also justify the work of GetUp!, which strives to bring attention to specific issues in Australia.

If you want access to the Excel file with all the tweets, please comment or send me an e-mail. The file is about 24meg so I didn’t upload it.

Related Posts:

What domains in #afl related tweets get the most RT@ ReTweets?

Posted by Laura on Thursday, 19 August, 2010

This post is a follow up to What #afl related hashtags get the most RT @ ReTweets? and Want to be Retweeted? Add URLs to Your Tweets!. This post looks at the what domains get the most retweets in tweets related to the AFL. It borrows the methodology (and assumptions) from the previous post with two major differences. First, the tweet collection had 10,412 total tweets instead of 8,523 at the start. (More recent tweets and more tweets.) Second, a new tool was needed to lengthen short urls. The tool that was used was Long URL please, a FireFox extension. Short links were copy pasted from Excel to a draft document, urls were lengthened and then pasted back. (When URLs were not lengthened, they were manually visited to get the real url.)

That out of the way, there 10,412 total tweets that could be examined. The list of keywords used can be found at using my raw data. Duplicate Tweets were removed bringing the total to 6,313 unique tweets. Tweets that did not include a url were removed. This brought the Tweet total down to 2,892 tweets. (About 46% of AFL related Tweets include a URL. This compares to 52% of AFL related Tweets with #hashtags.) There were 2,941 urls in these Tweets, with 2,582 unique urls in these Tweets. Of these, there were 623 unique domains. For all AFL related Tweets with urls, the following domains were the most popular:

Domains Count
http://afl.com.au 248
http://foxsports.com.au 140
http://heraldsun.com.au 115
http://au.sport.yahoo.com 112
http://abc.net.au 101
http://aflfeeds.com 67
http://twitpic.com 67
http://sportal.com.au 65
http://couriermail.com.au 64
http://news.aflspace.com 60
http://news.google.com 51
http://twitter.com 49
http://facebook.com 47
http://youtube.com 41
http://feedproxy.google.com 37
http://portadelaidefc.com.au 36
http://theage.com.au 34
http://skynews.com.au 32
http://bigpondnews.com 27
http://essendonfc.com.au 26
http://sportsnewsodds.com 26
http://yfrog.com 25
http://askbiography.com 24
http://sydneyswans.com.au 23
http://tweetphoto.com 21
http://adelaidenow.com.au 19
http://news.smh.com.au 19
http://saints.com.au 19
http://twitlonger.com 19
http://footyheads.com.au 18
http://melbournefc.com.au 18
http://sports.espn.go.com 18
http://contestedfooty.com 17
http://hawthornfc.com.au 17
http://thebigtip.com.au 17
http://themonk.com.au 15
http://feeds.feedburner.com 14
http://feeds.theroar.com.au 14
http://https: 14
http://flickr.com 13
http://oohja.com 13
http://rttf.posterous.com 13
http://topikality.com 13
http://yoursupercoachcoach.com 13
http://foursquare.com 12
http://mashable.com 12
http://racingandsports.com.au 12
http://theaustralian.com.au 12
http://3aw.com.au 11
http://dailymail.co.uk 11
http://3ba.com.au 10
http://blog.aflcio.org 10
http://goldcoastfc.com.au 10
http://huffingtonpost.com 10
http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au 10

Of the Tweets with urls, only 342 of them were ReTweets. That means about 5% of AFL related ReTweets contain domains. (Compare that to ReTweets containing #hashtags: 8%.) There were 150 domains mentioned Amongst those, the following domains were the most popular:

Domains Count
http://twitpic.com 23
http://essendonfc.com.au 17
http://heraldsun.com.au 15
http://sydneyswans.com.au 13
http://hawthornfc.com.au 10
http://youtube.com 10
http://twitlonger.com 9
http://afl.com.au 8
http://twitter.com 8
http://feeds.feedburner.com 7
http://mashable.com 7
http://saints.com.au 7
http://feedproxy.google.com 6
http://tweetphoto.com 6
http://3aw.com.au 5
http://blog.aflcio.org 5
http://aflpablog.com.au 4
http://facebook.com 4
http://flickr.com 4
http://melbournefc.com.au 4
http://patdollard.com 4
http://portadelaidefc.com.au 4
http://thebigtip.com.au 4
http://yfrog.com 4
http://afc.com.au 3
http://dailymail.co.uk 3
http://geelongadvertiser.com.au 3
http://goldcoastfc.com.au 3
http://kangaroos.com.au 3
http://skynews.com.au 3
http://sportsnewsfirst.com.au 3
http://abc.net.au 2
http://bigfooty.com 2
http://community.thisisplymouth.co.uk 2
http://diamondkpartypeople.blogspot.com 2
http://dreamteam2010.org 2
http://images.slatterymedia.com 2
http://live.tech45.eu 2
http://mtv.com 2
http://myloc.me 2
http://rttf.posterous.com 2
http://theage.com.au 2
http://videos.onsmash.com 2
http://votesmart.com.au 2
http://watoday.com.au 2

The domains that are ReTweeted are interesting. It is really easy to link spam on Twitter and some people and organizations do. If you look at some accounts, they post view TwitterFeed. Beyond that, you can tell when looking at a URL list that automated link posting is happening because the account may be using a URL shortener that isn’t as popular and the URLs tend to follow a sequence. The AFL and various news services put out URLs and they just aren’t getting ReTweeted at the same rate that they are getting posted. What is getting ReTweeted? People’s pictures and club related links.

Looking at both the domain list and the Domain ReTweet list, one thing that stands out for me is the lack of Wikipedia links. Wikipedia ranks really high on Google and other search engines. The AFL related content is highly ranked. The AFL articles are often really, really, really good and they are updated frequently. They can be really useful when looking for historical information. Thus, I’m surprised that there were only 3 references to Wikipedia. What gives? Why isn’t Wikipedia being cited more?

Moving on, 488 accounts were mentioned in the 343 ReTweets with URLs. The following table gives an idea as to who the most popular mentions were:

Mentioned Count
@essendon_fc 22
@sydneyswans 20
@hawthornfc 12
@stkildafc 12
@AFL 11
@AFLPA 10
@AFLCIO 8
@superfooty 8
@Footyfree 7
@RTTF_AU 7
@mashable 6
@3AW693 5
@adelaide_fc 5
@blackpolitics 5
@Collingwood_FC 5
@StevenBaker10 5
@DJPANIIC 4
@GoldCoastFC 4
@heraldsun 4
@PAFCNews 4
@PatDollard 4
@watoday 4
@antonKart 3
@Carlton_FC 3
@DemonsHQ 3
@iamdiddy 3
@mydogateart 3
@myfabolouslife 3
@northkangaroos 3
@redcafesd 3
@reggie_bush 3
@ruanji 3
@Sportsnewsfirst 3
@TeamHippo 3

That Essendon and Sydney were amongst the most mentioned doesn’t come as a surprise: Their domains were highly ranked. What is a bit surprising that the Blues aren’t highly ranked; they ranked highly for mentions with #hashtags. St. Kilda ranked highly on both lists. I half want to attribute this to the idea that their audience may be more Twitter savvy than other clubs’s fans. I’d have thought players might have been higher on this list but they really don’t appear to be a factor. This may suggest that players are not Tweeting urls or that content isn’t what their fans are interested in.

The lesson of these two posts is that if you want your AFL related tweets reposted, be partisan in your support and link to official club content that the news services haven’t yet written about yet.

Related Posts:

What #afl related hashtags get the most RT @ ReTweets?

Posted by Laura on Sunday, 15 August, 2010

While on vacation, a friend of mine recommended I read Want to be Retweeted? Add Hashtags to Your Tweets! The article is rather interesting and looks at the #hashtags that led to the most ReTweets.

I have a collection of AFL related tweets that I update semi-regularly. More often than not, I use these for geographic related analysis. My AFL tweet collection has a series of issues though that make me hesitant to always draw definitive conclusions from it. These issues include:

  • Incomplete tweet set for keywords: I only get what is available from Searchtastic.
  • Incomplete tweet set based on keyword limitations: Even supposing I could get all the tweets related to a keyword, I can’t find every reference to the AFL as there are too many possible words that could reference the AFL and its clubs.
  • Incomplete tweet set because of time: Some keywords were searched for earlier and some later. Not all keywords were looked at over the same period.
  • Irrelevant tweets: Keywords like #gosaints may refer to the St. Kilda Saints or the New Orleans Saints. AFL may refer to the AFL-CIO, a union in the United States. Unless every tweet is examined, irrelevant tweets will remain in the data set.

These are major obstacles to doing any sort of content analysis for Twitter when specific subgroups are looked at. Many of these issues are ones that other researchers are likely to have too: You can’t get the complete data set, will include garbage data and may not be entirely timely.

That said, despite these limitations, I still wanted to know what are the most popular #hashtags for AFL related tweets and what type of hashtags are likely to be ReTweeted.

To get my dataset of Tweets, first I went to Searchtastic, ran a series of searches over the course of 6 weeks, and exported those results to Excel. I noted the keyword I searched for and the team that keyword is related to. The keyword searches that were run on Searchtastic during this period included: #afl, #aflbluestigers, #aflcatslions, #afldemonsswans, #afldogscats, #afldogsfreo, #afldogspower, #afleaglesblues, #aflfooty, #aflhawksdemons, #aflkangasbombers, #aflkangasfreo, #AFLPAQUIZ, #aflpiestigers, #aflpowercrows, #aflpowereagles, #aflsaintshawks, #aflswanshawks , #brisbanelions, #dreamteam, #footy, #fremantle, #freo, #freo AFL, #goblues, #gobombers, #Gocats, #gocrows, #gopies, #gosaints, #goswans, #NMFC, #northmelbourne, #sackermanis, #supercoach, #sydneyswans, #teamgws, #thekennel, #wafl, #westcoast afl, ackermanis sacked, ACT4GWS, Adelaide Crows, Adelaide_FC, afl Bombers, AFL GWS, AFL Magpies, afl pies, AFL Tony Lockett, Aker Bulldogs, Akermanis, akermanis dogs, akermanis gillard, Australian rules, blues afl, Brad Johnson, Brad Johnson AFL, Brady Rawlings, brisbane afl, Brisbane Lions, Brownlow Medal, Cameron Mooney cats, Carlton Blues, Chris Judd Carlton, Collingwood, collingwood AFL, Collingwood Magpies, crows afl, Damien Hardwick, DemonsHQ, Dockers AFL, eagles afl, eagles perth, Eric Mackenzie , Essendon afl, Essendon Bombers, etihad kilda, folau afl, folau israel, Fremantle Dockers, fremantle ruckman, GCFC, geelong cats, Gold Coast Suns, harry_o, Hawthorn Hawks, HawthornFC, Jason Akermanis, Jeff Kennett, Judd Blues, kilda, kilda AFL, kilda riewoldt, lions afl, Mark Harvey, mcg kilda, Melbourne Demons, milburn cats, Nathan van Berlo Crows, North Melbourne Kangaroos, PAFC, Peter Szental, Port Adelaide Power, portadelaidefc, Richmond Football, Richmond Tigers, Rodney Eade dogs, roos afl, sackermanis, spoon eagles, spoon lions, spoon tigers, spoon wce, swans afl, swans footy, swans ruckman, Sydney Swans, tigers afl, Travis Johnstone, Trent Cotchin, WCE AFL, West Coast Eagles, and Western Bulldogs. These keywords represent all teams and often include multiple keywords for them.

The next step was to remove all duplicate tweets. As some tweets contain multiple keywords and some searches were run more than once over that 6-week time period, that possibility existed. To do this, three columns were copy and pasted to a new worksheet: Username, Tweet and In Reply To. On Excel, I did this using Filter -> Advanced Filter -> Unique records only. This process took the total tweets from 8,523 to 5,427.

The third step was to identify all the hash tags used in this data set. To do this, I copy and pasted all the tweets to Notepad. I ran a find and replace for [space]# and replaced with [tab]#. I copy and pasted these back, removed all cells that did not start with a #. After this was done, the data set was copy and pasted back to Notepad. Another find and replace was done, this time, [space] was replaced with [tab]. This was pasted back to excel and all cells that did not start with # were deleted. The completed list was 2,833 total hashtags used. Of these, 556 were unique. The following table counts their total usage:

Hashtag Total times used
#afl 724
#gosaints 110
#gocats 84
#DreamTeam 79
#aflswanshawks 53
#aflpiestigers 51
#aflpowereagles 51
#afldogscats 47
#aflfooty 46
#aflsaintshawks 45
#footy 44
#aflhawksdemons 43
#aflbluestigers 41
#aflcatslions 41
#afleaglesblues 41
#AFLPAQUIZ 39
#aflkangasfreo 38
#brisbanelions 38
#aflkangasbombers 36
#GoSwans 35
#Goblues 34
#ausvotes 33
#gopies 31
#ff 28
#afldogsfreo 25
#Essendon 21
#GoBombers 20
#afldemonsswans 18
#Fremantle 17
#SuperCoach 17
#afllionscrows 16
#adelaide 15
#aflpowercrows 14
#news 13
#thekennel 12
#football 10
#Sackermanis 9
#11BOYS 8
#afllionssaints 8
#AUG21STCLUBVENUS 8
#Blues 8
#collingwood 8
#GUAPGANG 8
#Hawks 8
#HNG 8
#Lions 8
#Australia 7
#Dockers 7
#fb 7
#freo 7
#sports 7
#wce 7
#aker 6
#jobs 6
#lost 6
#NMFC 6
#ABC 5
#aflbluesdogs 5
#Chelsea 5
#Eng 5
#NorthMelbourne 5
#pafc 5
#wafl 5
#aflbombersblues 4
#aflfreoswans 4
#akermanis 4
#blog 4
#bombers 4
#Bulldogs 4
#DOPEVIDEOALERT!! 4
#fail 4
#GOPIES! 4
#gopies!! 4
#GOSAINTS! 4
#gws 4
#pies 4
#sport 4
#worldcup 4
#aflcatshawks 3
#aflcrowscats 3
#afleagleslions 3
#argyleman 3
#beer 3
#bj008 3
#Crows 3
#dogs 3
#dss10 3
#footyshow 3
#Freelance 3
#Gillard 3
#goldcoast 3
#Light 3
#Melbourne 3
#plymouth 3
#sagreat 3
#sydneyswans 3
#tcot 3
#travel 3
#wa 3
#WORDPRESS 3
#17Julay 2
#afl: 2
#AFLCIO 2
#aka 2
#akermanis, 2
#alp 2
#Apple 2
#AstonVilla 2
#BERBATOV 2
#brisbane 2
#Carlton 2
#CarltonFC 2
#CATS 2
#CFL 2
#Chargers 2
#Chile 2
#Cousins 2
#DREAMTEAM!!! 2
#DT 2
#Eagles 2
#economist 2
#FERGUSON 2
#FollowFriday 2
#footyfriday 2
#gno 2
#GOBLUES! 2
#goCats! 2
#GOCROWS 2
#gosaints. 2
#Hamburg 2
#Health 2
#Idontthinkso 2
#Illegal 2
#job 2
#kentucky 2
#lastfm 2
#lp’s 2
#magpies 2
#mofo 2
#Monday 2
#monkbeer 2
#NBA 2
#New 2
#Obesity 2
#online 2
#P2 2
#ROONEY 2
#Soccer 2
#Sportal 2
#suns 2
#Sydney 2
#TeamFollowBack 2
#Þ¹ Óù²_ 2
#thefootyshow 2
#throughandthrough 2
#Tigers 2
#TT 2
#WhoDat 2
# 1
#011 1
#1 1
#1, 1
#15 1
#17 1
#2. 1
#2010 1
#3 1
#3DAL 1
#6 1
#6insolidaity 1
#7 1
#ABCnews24 1
#adelaide, 1
#adversity 1
#af… 1
#AFL! 1
#AFL, 1
#afl. 1
#Aflac 1
#aflbulldogscats 1
#aflcatspies 1
#aflcionow 1
#afldemonsbombers 1
#afldemonsswans. 1
#afldogscats101 1
#afldogskangas 1
#afldogspower 1
#afleaglesfreo 1
#AFLfootyshow 1
#aflhawksdogs 1
#aflordapele 1
#AFLPA 1
#AFLPAQUIZ. 1
#aflpiestigers. 1
#aflsaintshawks. 1
#afrodigital 1
#akergate. 1
#Akermanis. 1
#akermankiss 1
#Albania 1
#A-League 1
#alfsaintshawks 1
#AlfStewart 1
#allday 1
#AllieGentry 1
#annoyingquestion 1
#Argyle 1
#ArizonaFallLeague 1
#Art 1
#Astros 1
#AUG28THHIGHLANDPARK 1
#aussiemigration 1
#Autocar 1
#avidfan 1
#BagelTuesday 1
#bankshowdown 1
#Barcelona 1
#Basketball 1
#batman 1
#BBB 1
#BBB, 1
#bcfc 1
#BEATthebotssss 1
#beenthere 1
#Belgium 1
#BELIEVE 1
#BENNY 1
#betchaknowem 1
#beu 1
#BigFooty 1
#blessings 1
#bmb 1
#boomers 1
#Bordeaux 1
#boulen10? 1
#breakuplines 1
#Bremen 1
#Briggswentdownlike 1
#BrisbaneLions! 1
#BrisbaneLions. 1
#broncos 1
#brugerdisken 1
#Brumbies 1
#caa 1
#cannes 1
#Canterbury-Bankstown 1
#carnbombers 1
#Celtic 1
#CERN 1
#CERTIFIED 1
#championship 1
#Cheetahs 1
#chi 1
#cliffhanghaunters 1
#Climate 1
#CNNHeroes. 1
#cocaine 1
#Coffee 1
#Collingwood. 1
#Collingwood: 1
#collingwoodfc 1
#Colombia 1
#Conservation 1
#conservative. 1
#cop15 1
#Corvette 1
#cowboys 1
#coworking 1
#crazyideas 1
#cubs 1
#deals 1
#deetrain!) 1
#defense 1
#Demetriou 1
#dicaduca 1
#diet 1
#doublestandard 1
#draft 1
#draw365 1
#DREAMTEAM- 1
#DREAMTEAM! 1
#DREAMTEAM!!!!! 1
#DREAMTEAM!!!!!!! 1
#DREAMTEAM!!!!!!!!! 1
#DREAMTEAM!GET 1
#dreamteam(u 1
#DreamTeam, 1
#dreamteam..like 1
#dreamteam2010 1
#dreamteam2010(Ur 1
#drmtm 1
#druggies 1
#Duck 1
#duh 1
#duisburg 1
#dumb 1
#Eagles. 1
#ecommerce 1
#ecommretail 1
#EdeActueel 1
#efficiënt 1
#elmundial 1
#elvisfest 1
#ems 1
#emt 1
#England 1
#epic 1
#EquipedelaRêve 1
#ESPN3: 1
#everyday 1
#everyoneshappy 1
#excitedtweet 1
#faic 1
#fanniemae 1
#fascinating 1
#fat 1
#FCTwente 1
#FcukFranklin 1
#fd10p2m 1
#Fev 1
#FFGLBS 1
#FIFA 1
#fireupdons 1
#fitness 1
#flag 1
#flagship 1
#flash 1
#Flight 1
#flotilla 1
#FLYSTLYE 1
#FollowNow 1
#footyclassified 1
#footyOne 1
#footyshow. 1
#footyteammovies 1
#forçafluminense 1
#FoxFooty 1
#Foxtel 1
#free 1
#Freelancer 1
#freeweezy 1
#freo. 1
#freshen 1
#FridayFwit. 1
#fromtheouter 1
#Fuckem
%- %(
1
#fuckyeah 1
#Gabon 1
#gallery: 1
#game 1
#Gaza 1
#GCFC 1
#Geelong 1
#GeelongCats 1
#GER, 1
#GERONIMO 1
#GGMU 1
#GOAT 1
#GoBears 1
#goBears! 1
#GOBLUES. 1
#GOCHELSEA 1
#GOGIANTS 1
#gopies!!! 1
#GoSaints!! 1
#gosaintsFC 1
#gostkilda 1
#GoSwans! 1
#GoSwans!!! 1
#gothepies 1
#green, 1
#GroenWerkt 1
#GUCCI 1
#guitar 1
#Haiku 1
#haiti: 1
#HamOnt 1
#handig 1
#Hanley. 1
#HardMan 1
#harry-o 1
#hawks#Hawthorn#AFL 1
#Hawthorn 1
#hcr, 1
#healthybusiness, 1
#healthyliving 1
#hiring 1
#History 1
#hnw 1
#Hockey 1
#HOLIDAY 1
#hollin 1
#homepark 1
#hotels 1
#HTC 1
#humor 1
#iConfess 1
#i’dliketoseethat! 1
#ihatecollingwood 1
#ihatequotes 1
#ihaveadream 1
#IloveagoodConspiracryTheory 1
#imabitscared 1
#immaturelittleboy 1
#in 1
#inception, 1
#IndianapolisColts 1
#Insiders: 1

The next step was to count the total @ replies and hashtag uses. To do this, all the unique tweets were copied to a new worksheet. A filter was created to list all tweets that did not include an @ sign. These tweets were deleted. This brought the total tweets from 5,427 to 1,844. The next step was to create a filter to show all tweets that did not include a #. These tweets were then deleted. This brought the total Tweets down to 832. The next step was to look remove tweets that did not contain “RT @”, “RT:@”, “retweeting @”, “retweet @”, “via @”, “thx @”, “HT @”, or “r @”. This leaves 458 tweets that are retweets that contain hash tags.

The same process was conducted to count the hash tags that was used for all hash tags and RT @. The following list was created of people who were the most ReTweeted (or mentioned in the ReTweeted tweet) where the tweets contained #hashtags and the #hashtag totals for ReTweets. These were then totaled and counted, resulting in the following table:

Hashtag Count ReTweeted Count
#GOSAINTS 37 @afl 44
#DreamTeam 36 @Carlton_FC 24
#GoCats 26 @stkildafc 23
#AFL 25 @hawthornfc 16
#afleaglesblues 21 @Essendon_FC 15
#pafc 20 @Geelong_FC 12
#aflkangasbombers 19 @sydneyswans 12
#aflpiestigers 18 @iamdiddy 10
#aflsaintshawks 18 @Richmond_FC 9
#aflswanshawks 17 @AFLPA 8
#ausvotes 12 @Adelaide_FC 7
#aflpowereagles 10 @JuliaGillard 7
#AflKANGASfreo 9 @northkangaroos 7
#brisbanelions 9 @_the_kennel_ 6
#NMFC 8 @bigmacvikings 6
#sackermanis 8 @Collingwood_FC 6
#thekennel 8 @dizzyyet 6
#Adelaide 7 @redcafesd 6
#aflcatslions 7 @seanpaull 6
#afllionssaints 7 @aflcio 5
#aflhawksdemons 6 @Gottrocks 5
#AFLPAQUIZ 6 @myfabolouslife 5
#aflpowercrows 6 @PAFC 5
#11BOYS 5 @triplemfooty 5
#GoBombers 5 @AFLStatsGuys 4
#GoPies 5 @AveStarLJ 4
#P2 5 @Bickys 4
#tcot 5 @Bigdroppunt 4
#travel 5 @Blonde_Cheeks 4
#afldemonsswans 4 @CatsInsider 4
#fremantle 4 @crowdiegal 4
#gopies!! 4 @DemonsHQ 4
#goswans 4 @DjPaniic 4
#lions 4 @Fremantle_FC 4
#soccer 4 @jletti 4
#tags: 4 @JOEYCRACKTS 4
#throughandthrough 4 @SENNews 4
#afldogsfreo 3 @tabloidterror 4
#aker 3 @tedwards2 4
#akermanis 3 @THEjennykim 4
#AUG21STCLUBVENUS 3 @themonkbeer 4
#beer 3 @tjrharley 4
#ecfc 3 @aburt 3
#ENG 3 @charlenemay 3
#FF 3 @drwarwick 3
#GUAPGANG 3 @Footyfree 3
#HNG 3 @fromtheouter 3
#monkbeer 3 @garethdn 3
#sewelliscool 3 @mydogateart 3
#SydneySwans 3 @NikkiRoks 3
#WhoDat 3 @pluke17 3
#worldcup 3 @rachii_10 3
#aflbluestigers 2 @rickyrozay 3
#afleagleslions 2 @RTTF_AU 3
#aflfooty 2 @StadiumMustard 3
#aka 2 @TLW3 3
#argyleman 2 @trmash 3
#bj008 2 @afletch5 2
#bulldogs 2 @AFLNewsWire 2
#dogs 2 @AlexBrink10 2
#DOPEVIDEOALERT!! 2 @alexhart7 2
#dreamteam2010 2 @andrewbolt 2
#footy 2 @angiemartinez 2
#footyfriday 2 @annielin 2
#footyshow 2 @BradJohnson6 2
#Fuckem
%- %(
2 @BrigandLehmo 2
#Gillard 2 @brotheramos 2
#GoBears 2 @CalAthletics 2
#Goblues 2 @catsman09 2
#Illegal 2 @ChristophHewett 2
#lp 2 @DaRealRoot 2
#nowplaying 2 @Diamonds_Pearlz 2
#plymouth 2 @DreamTeamatl_TK 2
#putthatinyourpipeandsmokeit 2 @DT_13 2
#ROCGiRLs 2 @EdMorrissey 2
#sagreat 2 @emmat18 2
#supercoach 2 @EssendonBomber 2
#thefootyshow 2 @FakeWoosha 2
#TwoDat 2 @globoesportecom 2
#wce 2 @HaroldKuepers. 2
#1, 1 @hawthornfc15 2
#accommodation 1 @iAmRozayyy 2
#aflak 1 @j_carroll7 2
#aflcrowscats 1 @JAE_MILLZ 2
#afldogscats 1 @jasminewright96 2
#aflfreoswans 1 @jazzpafc 2
#AFLPA 1 @jeeziiroqk 2
#alp 1 @jimmywa11 2
#Argyle 1 @jmf27614 2
#Art 1 @jonboy79 2
#bankshowdown 1 @jonpierk 2
#BELIEVE 1 @jrwilliams22 2
#BENNY 1 @JsMiLeZ10 2
#BERBATOV 1 @kaatieee27 2
#BigFooty 1 @keithpitty 2
#BLOG 1 @Ladder_) 2
#boomers 1 @LEGITBOSS 2
#Briggswentdownlike 1 @letoyaluckett 2
#Celtic 1 @Lizziemcbizzie 2
#CERTIFIED 1 @M3lizza 2
#CFL 1 @milo317 2
#Chile 1 @MMMGUNNA 2
#Collingwood. 1 @MRS_MERCHANT 2
#CRS 1 @mstiffington 2
#cubs 1 @NeL_DTF 2
#deetrain! 1 @nick_wade 2
#draw365 1 @NICKIMINAJ 2
#DT 1 @NiKKi_E13 2
#Essendon 1 @noisyinstrument 2
#FERGUSON 1 @plymouthcc 2
#Flecoat 1 @ranyunfei 2
#Flight 1 @reggie_bush 2
#FLYSTLYE 1 @ruanji 2
#FollowNow 1 @SarahStanley 2
#Football 1 @SharinaBurns 2
#GERONIMO 1 @shelleyjames 2
#GGMU 1 @ShunnyBun 2
#glennbeck 1 @StadiumHero 2
#GOGIANTS 1 @SuadeMusic 2
#gop 1 @TalentedInk 2
#GoPies! 1 @TalkingCarlton 2
#GoSaints!!!! 1 @tech45cast 2
#gosaintsFC 1 @tgrant20 2
#gostkilda 1 @the_tony 2
#green, 1 @TheCONDO 2
#GUCCI 1 @therealsmoir 2
#haiti: 1 @TheRealYungBerg 2
#Hawks 1 @TheVoyuer 2
#healthybusiness 1 @thisgirlrox 2
#healthyliving 1 @thisischile 2
#hiring 1 @thisisScoMan 2
#HOLIDAY 1 @timvl 2
#HTC 1 @tip66 2
#ihaveadream 1 @tkpleslie 2
#in 1 @TrendsMelbourne 2
#Inter 1 @UnitedWayTC 2

Based on this sample, (because the whole of the population of AFL tweets is not available and cannot the total cannot be counted to determine the representative value of the sample) the most RTed #hashtag in a Tweet related to the AFL is #gosaints. #dreamteam comes in second. #gocats comes in third. #afl comes in fourth.

The #gosaints tag is popular and the team’s official account has encouraged its use. More recently, New Orleans Saints fans have used it as the NFL pre-season has started. #dreamteam is one of the two most popular AFL fantasy leagues and those fantasy leagues are big into fostering community. Beyond these top four, the most popular tags tend to involve specific match ups. If all tags related to match ups had been included around the time that the games took place, it is highly possible more would be on that list.

In terms of who gets RTed and mentioned in ReTweets, official accounts dominate: The AFL, Carlton, St. Kilda, Hawthorn, the Bombers, Geelong and the Swans. The first non-team account to appear is P. Diddy and he is followed by a number of influential Australian social media people. The next person / non-official AFL account to appear is Julia Gillard. AFL players do not appear to be ReTweeted en masse when compared to their club sides. This isn’t to say that people don’t actively read and follow them. If looking at ReTweets without #hashtags, @harry_o would appear on top with 50 mentions. It is probable that clubs are using #hashtags and players are not; there could be a digital cultural awareness divide between the two.

A copy of the data and some of my step by step process making it workable can be found at RTAFL.xls. I find the whole thing really interesting. If anyone has any tools to make dataming easier or has a suggestion for additional research in this area, let me know as I’d love to hear it.

Related Posts:

AFL sentiment by location: Where are fans the happiest and saddest?

Posted by Laura on Friday, 6 August, 2010

This is a follow up to AFL fan community sentiment: Are fans happy or sad? where I’ve mapped the location of Twitter followers using the data set referenced in the post. The methodology for data collection is outlined there. For tweets that were labeled both happy and sad, they were counted once for each emotion.



View full map

Interesting to note: When viewing the whole of the country, Adelaide SA and Albury VIC are the places where happiness dominates more than other places. When zooming into more, Alberton SA, Dean VIC, Endeavor Hills VIC, Frankston South VIC, Sunshine Coast QLD are the happy places. Given the state of the AFL ladder, that Adelaide has more happy tweets than sad tweets is a bit surprising.

Any other observations? Do people trust sentiment analysis when it comes to sport? Is there a way that this could be refined to make it more trustworthy?

Related Posts:

Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter

Posted by Laura on Thursday, 29 July, 2010

I haven’t done an update in a month or so… but this is my list of Australian clubs, leagues and athletes on Twitter.  It is sorted by followers.  The list is rather comprehensive but not all comprehensive.  A few accounts have been deleted since the last time I did this.  Those accounts aren’t noted this time around. And unlike the last time around, I haven’t htmled the Twitter accounts.  If you see any people or clubs or fansites that I’m missing, let me know in the comments.

League Team Account Date collected Following Followers Lists
First class cricket New South Wales Blues PH408 (player) 29-Jul-10 0 12,146 407
Super 14 Natal Sharks JohnSmit123 (player) 29-Jul-10 21 11,368 414
AFL AFL AFL (official) 29-Jul-10 269 11,326 388
Super 14 Pretoria Bulls (Northern Bulls) VictorMatfield (player) 29-Jul-10 36 10,651 414
Rugby World Cup South Africa Lions LionsRugbyTeam 29-Jul-10 10,529 9,738 291
NRL Wests Tigers LoteTuqiri (player) 29-Jul-10 70 9,307 449
Rugby World Cup All Blacks nzru 29-Jul-10 88 8,795 432
NRL NRL NRL 29-Jul-10 29 6,816 216
NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons RealBigDell (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 113 6,641 215
AFL Collingwood Magpies Collingwood_FC 29-Jul-10 5,516 6,205 207
AFL Essendon Bombers Essendon_FC 29-Jul-10 5,677 5,791 196
AFL Adelaide Crows Adelaide_FC 29-Jul-10 5,642 5,656 199
AFL Melbourne Demons jimstynes (player) 29-Jul-10 13 5,508 142
Super 14 Queensland Reds QuadeCooper (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 50 5,439 215
AFL Collingwood Magpies harry_o (player) 29-Jul-10 498 5,329 201
AFL Essendon Bombers JobeWatson (player) 29-Jul-10 5 4,937 156
AFL Sydney Swans sydneyswans (official) 29-Jul-10 2,461 4,848 195
Super 14 Canterbury Crusaders mornesteyn (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 2 4,566 213
Super 14 Wellington Hurricanes NeemiaTialata (Neemia Tialata) 29-Jul-10 1,283 4,541 283
Swimming Australia Stephanie Rice ItsStephRice (athlete) 29-Jul-10 93 4,418 225
NRL Gold Coast Titans mat_rogers6 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 132 4,285 224
AFL Essendon Bombers AngusMonfries (player) 29-Jul-10 16 4,264 157
World Cup Socceroos socceroos (official) 29-Jul-10 756 4,043 181
AFL Hawthorn Hawks lehmo23 (player) 29-Jul-10 521 4,010 154
Super 14 Wellington Hurricanes Hurricanesrugby 29-Jul-10 3,320 3,825 159
AFL St. Kilda Saints stkildafc (official) 29-Jul-10 3,885 3,816 157
AFL Carlton Blues Carlton_FC (official) 29-Jul-10 2,979 3,659 169
AFL Geelong Cats Geelong_FC (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 1,992 3,119 126
Rugby World Cup Wallabies QantasWallabies 29-Jul-10 383 3,076 172
First class cricket New South Wales Blues NBRACKEN142 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 85 2,828 152
Super 14 Wellington Hurricanes Powza13 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 390 2,690 173
AFL Hawthorn Hawks HawthornFC (official) 29-Jul-10 8 2,597 139
AFL Richmond Tigers Richmond_FC 29-Jul-10 148 2,525 122
AFL Melbourne Demons nathan2jones (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 253 2,490 106
NRL Gold Coast Titans GCTitans 29-Jul-10 12 2,447 109
AFL Collingwood Magpies mickmalthouse (Mick Malthouse) 29-Jul-10 11 2,297 66
AFL North Melbourne Kangaroos northkangaroos (official) 29-Jul-10 69 2,241 125
A-League Melbourne Victory gomvfc 29-Jul-10 1,429 2,211 144
AFL Brisbane Lions BrendanFevola05 (player) 29-Jul-10 27 2,189 72
NRL New Zealand Warriors (Auckland Warriors) nzwarriors (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 372 2,182 77
AFL Melbourne Demons DemonsHQ (official) 29-Jul-10 311 1,896 114
World Cup Socceroos socceroos_news (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 1,723 1,858 80
Super 14 Cape Town Stormers (Western Stormers) THESTORMERS 29-Jul-10 213 1,828 76
AFL Melbourne Demons CamSchwab (ceo) 29-Jul-10 288 1,810 81
AFL Port Adelaide Power PAFC (official) 29-Jul-10 31 1,804 123
NRL Wests Tigers Wests_Tigers (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 827 1,787 74
AFL West Coast Eagles WCEofficial 29-Jul-10 4 1,775 113
Super 14 Durban Sharks (Coastal Sharks)(Natal Sharks) sharksrugby 29-Jul-10 36 1,766 86
AFL Collingwood Magpies DT_13 (Dale Thomas) 29-Jul-10 6 1,751 44
NRL North Queensland Cowboys northqldcowboys 29-Jul-10 37 1,649 77
Tennis Australia Tennis Australia TennisAustralia (official) 29-Jul-10 63 1,638 165
NBL Melbourne Tigers Follow24Hodge (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 27 1,638 93
NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs SSFCRABBITOHS 29-Jul-10 789 1,610 89
AFL Fremantle Dockers Fremantle_FC (official) 29-Jul-10 147 1,578 104
NRL Melbourne Storm MelbStormRLC (official) 29-Jul-10 1,184 1,473 87
AFL Gold Coast Football Club GoldCoastFC (official) 29-Jul-10 571 1,458 110
AFL Hawthorn Hawks Hawks_AFL (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 1,979 1,446 29
ANZ Championship Melbourne Vixens MelbourneVixens 29-Jul-10 706 1,405 56
NRL Manly Sea Eagles manlyseaeagles 29-Jul-10 111 1,338 72
First class cricket Victorian Bushrangers Bushrangers 29-Jul-10 1,389 1,336 89
First class cricket New South Wales Blues ClarkeVC (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 34 1,264 41
AFL Melbourne Demons Rickypetterd15 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 66 1,260 57
NBL Adelaide 36ers Adelaide36ers 29-Jul-10 834 1,132 66
AFL Melbourne Demons howcroft 29-Jul-10 68 1,127 38
AFL North Melbourne Kangaroos andrewswallow (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 13 1,096 67
NRL NRL NRLNEWS (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 182 1,068 27
NRL Penrith Panthers penrithpanthers (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 83 1,067 70
Super 14 Canterbury Crusaders crusadersrugby 29-Jul-10 2 1,065 75
AFL Western Bulldogs westernbulldogs (official) 29-Jul-10 9 1,053 68
AFL Brisbane Lions ALFbrisbane (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 3 1,053 45
A-League Melbourne Victory mitchlangerak (player) 29-Jul-10 13 1,010 58
NRL Parramatta Eels parramatta_eels 29-Jul-10 1,090 993 27
AFL Collingwood Magpies PeterDaicos (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 684 964 60
ANZ Championship Melbourne Vixens SharelleVixens 29-Jul-10 35 961 37
A-League Sydney FC SydneyFC1011 29-Jul-10 786 955 78
AFL AFL SENfooty 29-Jul-10 59 946 48
A-League Central Coast Mariners Football Club LawrieMcKinna (coach) 29-Jul-10 1 922 68
A-League Melbourne Victory adrianleijer (player, Adrian Leijer) 29-Jul-10 48 906 65
NBL Wollongong Hawks wollongonghawks 29-Jul-10 1,568 881 63
AFL Melbourne Demons MCC_Members 29-Jul-10 558 857 27
NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs benross23 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 48 854 42
Super 14 ACT Brumbies BrumbiesRugby 29-Jul-10 135 848 65
NBL South Dragons Joeingles7 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 43 830 50
NRL Melbourne Storm MelbourneStorm_ (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 13 827 28
Super 14 Queensland Reds RedsRugby (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 166 824 44
Super 14 Queensland Reds Reds_Rugby 29-Jul-10 26 817 58
AFL Collingwood Magpies bigdyman (player) 29-Jul-10 19 810 54
AFL AFL AFLphotos (official) 29-Jul-10 75 798 46
NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs therabbitohs (official) 29-Jul-10 10 790 61
NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs therabbitohs (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 10 790 61
NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs rabbitohs (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 665 788 36
A-League North Queensland Fury FC nqfuryfc 29-Jul-10 1,808 786 52
Super 14 Natal Sharks KeeganDaniel (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 5 761 42
NRL Parramatta Eels PirtekParraEels (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 7 759 46
NRL NRL NRLTweet (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 161 731 43
AFL Collingwood Magpies collingwoodnews (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 1 729 31
First class cricket Queensland Bulls andrew_symonds (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 5 716 28
NBL Perth Wildcats perthwildcats 29-Jul-10 74 704 54
Super 14 Melbourne Rebels melbournerebels 29-Jul-10 738 695 38
AIS University of Canberra National Institute of Sport Studies unicanberra 29-Jul-10 118 688 36
NSW Premier League Sydney Olympic MarkBosnich (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 16 676 44
Basketball Australia Australian Boomers aussieboomers 29-Jul-10 0 656 53
NBL NBL NBLhoops 29-Jul-10 47 651 52
NRL Gold Coast Titans AshHarrison1 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 25 618 40
A-League Melbourne Victory victoryinmelb 29-Jul-10 80 616 47
NRL New Zealand Warriors (Auckland Warriors) thenzwarriors 29-Jul-10 72 614 49
A-League Wellington Phoenix wgtnphoenixfc 29-Jul-10 57 612 41
NRL Canberra Raiders RaidersCanberra 29-Jul-10 5 608 58
A-League A-League thefootballsack (fansite) 29-Jul-10 1,920 594 39
NBL New Zealand Breakers johnrillie (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 347 592 48
AFL Fremantle Dockers Freo_Dockers (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 319 581 44
NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks SharksOnline (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 846 569 11
NRL Gold Coast Titans lukeodwyer (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 49 561 42
Netball Australia Netball Australia NetballAust 29-Jul-10 121 559 53
AFL West Coast Eagles wingsofperth (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 5 555 11
A-League Brisbane Roar BNERoar (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 186 539 42
AFL Greater Western Sydney team_gws (official) 29-Jul-10 102 538 50
A-League Perth Glory PerthGlory_FC 29-Jul-10 13 526 56
AFL St. Kilda Saints njbrown17 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 19 506 34
NRL Manly Sea Eagles gorgeousgrose (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 28 503 27
AFL Brisbane Lions AFLBrisbaneFC 29-Jul-10 25 484 21
NRL NRL TWiLeague (show) 29-Jul-10 1,262 480 29
A-League Adelaide United adelaideunited 29-Jul-10 134 480 46
A-League Newcastle Jets newcastle_jets 29-Jul-10 15 480 30
Super 14 Queensland Reds L_Weeks (player) 29-Jul-10 77 475 34
World Cup Socceroos GGArmy (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 576 471 28
AFL Fremantle Dockers FremantleFC (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 0 461 12
AFL Essendon Bombers JasonJohnson14 (former player) 29-Jul-10 17 460 18
NRL Parramatta Eels PlanetEels (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 551 456 26
A-League Sydney FC SFCNews (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 135 455 51
ANZ Championship Queensland Firebirds laurafirebirds (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 11 451 21
NBL Perth Wildcats CatsGM 29-Jul-10 53 424 53
NBL Wollongong Hawks milisimic (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 736 422 30
A-League Adelaide United adelaidereds 29-Jul-10 280 409 52
A-League Brisbane Roar brisbaneroar 29-Jul-10 4 404 47
Super 14 ACT Brumbies snorkymortlock (player) 29-Jul-10 9 403 23
NRL Brisbane Broncos broncosbigfan (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 398 389 20
ANZ Championship Adelaide Thunderbirds NatTbirds 29-Jul-10 0 389 20
AFL AFL AFL_Shifter (talent scout, Kevin Sheehan) 29-Jul-10 9 386 16
NRL NRL NRLlivebetting (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 17 379 2
NBL Townsville Crocodiles TsvCrocs 29-Jul-10 343 377 34
Netball Australia Australian Diamonds (national team) AussieDiamonds 29-Jul-10 40 371 21
ANZ Championship New South Wales Swifts SusanSwifts 29-Jul-10 23 360 22
AFL Sydney Swans JaredCrouch (former player) 29-Jul-10 72 356 22
Netball Victoria Netball Victoria netballvic 29-Jul-10 633 355 21
AFL AFL AFLInsider (official) 29-Jul-10 85 354 26
NBL Melbourne Tigers Wortho33 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 81 352 30
NBL Sydney Kings thesydneykings (official) 29-Jul-10 5 352 31
First class cricket Tassie Tigers crickettas 29-Jul-10 1 352 18
Rugby League/State of Origin New South Wales Blues NSWRL 29-Jul-10 58 345 23
NRL Wests Tigers fakebrycegibbs (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 369 344 19
NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons mighty_dragons (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 7 330 17
ANZ Championship Melbourne Vixens Renaehallinan (player) 29-Jul-10 35 328 14
NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks Fergo1990 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 16 327 21
NBL Townsville Crocodiles chomicide (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 201 323 26
AFL AFL AFL_JenWitham 29-Jul-10 140 322 34
NRL Parramatta Eels blueandgoldarmy (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 61 320 12
NBL Cairns Taipans Dusty_Rychart (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 45 317 22
Australian Cycling Federation rachel neylan rachneylan (athlete) 29-Jul-10 225 306 29
World Cup Socceroos HalfTimeHeroes (soccer fansite) 29-Jul-10 790 302 18
AFL West Coast Eagles WestCoastEagles (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 0 299 5
A-League A-League ultimatealeague (fansite) 29-Jul-10 44 287 29
AFL Melbourne Demons MelbourneFC (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 0 281 11
NRL Brisbane Broncos BrisbaneBronco (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 86 277 10
AFL Essendon Bombers essendonfc (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 0 266 9
AIS University of Canberra National Institute of Sport Studies 520507 (Keith Lyons) 29-Jul-10 336 265 12
AFL West Coast Eagles MitchJbrown17 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 7 263 30
NRL Newcastle Knights Corypato (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 25 261 16
First class cricket Victorian Bushrangers MatthewWade13 (player) 29-Jul-10 62 260 18
A-League Gold Coast United GCUSC (unofficial supporter club) 29-Jul-10 242 259 20
First class cricket New South Wales Blues eddiecowan (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 134 258 27
First class cricket Victorian Bushrangers AaronFinch5 (player) 29-Jul-10 78 256 17
NBL New Zealand Breakers NZBreakers 29-Jul-10 12 254 28
UCI Continental Team (Oceania Region) Team Jayco Skins / Cycling Australia teamjaycoskins (official) 29-Jul-10 19 249 19
AFL Melbourne Demons demonland (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 176 247 9
AFL Western Bulldogs _the_kennel_ 29-Jul-10 28 245 15
Hockey Australia Hockeyroos katehollywood10 29-Jul-10 66 242 13
AIHL Sydney Bears sydneybears 29-Jul-10 568 240 4
Tennis Australia Sam Stosur samstosurnews (official) 29-Jul-10 54 235 19
NBL New Zealand Breakers oscarforman (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 38 232 22
Handball Australia Canberra Handball Club sashpet (player) 29-Jul-10 897 222 6
NRL Brisbane Broncos broncobasher (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 243 219 5
ANZ Championship New South Wales Swifts nswswifts 29-Jul-10 8 216 16
A-League Central Coast Mariners Football Club CCMarinersFC (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 117 215 27
VFL Casey Scorpions CaseyScorpions 29-Jul-10 5 211 8
Volleyball Australia Volleyball Australia ausvolley 29-Jul-10 10 207 12
First class cricket South Australian Redbacks (Southern Redbacks) RedbacksT20 29-Jul-10 7 206 23
NBL Perth Wildcats TheRealSchensh (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 17 202 21
NBL Townsville Crocodiles rustyhinder (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 100 200 26
First class cricket Victorian Bushrangers petersiddle (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 1 193 18
AIHL Melbourne Ice TheMelbourneIce 29-Jul-10 1 193 9
NRL Parramatta Eels 1eyedeel (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 646 188 11
VFL Williamstown Football Club WilliamstownFC 29-Jul-10 175 188 7
ANZ Championship Adelaide Thunderbirds AdelaideTBirds 29-Jul-10 0 188 14
ANZ Championship Melbourne Vixens JulieCorletto (Julie Corletto) 29-Jul-10 27 187 6
Super 14 Western Australia Force (Western Force) s14_force 29-Jul-10 2 183 13
AFL Fremantle Dockers ryanmcrowley (player) 29-Jul-10 17 179 15
WNBL WNBL WNBL 29-Jul-10 38 178 22
Super 14 Central Cheetahs (Vodacom Cheetahs) VodacomCheetahs 29-Jul-10 44 177 13
AFL Sydney Swans BionicSwan (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 20 177 26
Super 14 Queensland Reds s14_queensland (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 2 169 10
VFL North Ballarat Roosters NB_Roosters 29-Jul-10 26 167 10
Rugby League/State of Origin Queensland Maroons QLD_Maroons 29-Jul-10 1 167 4
NBL Adelaide 36ers DarrenNg8 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 59 163 14
NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons jsaffy (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 11 159 13
NRL Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs bulldogsnews (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 105 145 6
A-League Melbourne Victory victorytwit (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 49 143 11
A-League Melbourne Victory mvfcfanzone 29-Jul-10 115 142 20
ANZ Championship West Coast Fever SusanWCFever 29-Jul-10 23 142 13
AFL Melbourne Demons matesOmelbourne (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 1 141 11
NRL Balmain Tigers tigers1908 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 7 137 11
AFL Western Bulldogs ccaallward (player) 29-Jul-10 0 136 24
AFL North Melbourne Kangaroos Marcus__White (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 27 135 16
AFL Hawthorn Hawks bmsew (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 22 132 21
NBL Perth Wildcats catslisch 29-Jul-10 10 132 8
First class cricket Queensland Bulls qldcricket 29-Jul-10 13 130 6
AFL AFL AFL_Aus (fansite) 29-Jul-10 0 126 7
NBL Adelaide 36ers jgovereasy (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 35 122 11
W-League W-League AusWomensGame (fansite) 29-Jul-10 43 112 11
AFL St. Kilda Saints RWBFooty (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 70 111 9
SFL Caulfield Bears CaulfieldBears 29-Jul-10 195 107 1
Gridiron Australia Nationals Perth Blitz fatloaf (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 170 100 4
Gridiron Australia Nationals WA Raiders fatloaf (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 170 100 4
AIHL AIHL AIHL 29-Jul-10 31 99 2
AIHL Gold Coast Bluetongues gcbluetongues 29-Jul-10 47 97 2
AFL Geelong Cats thecattery (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 16 97 5
NBL Sydney Kings sydneykings 29-Jul-10 61 94 12
Netball New South Wales Sydney_Netball 29-Jul-10 64 90 5
AFL Fremantle Dockers briansham (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 12 87 12
NBL Wollongong Hawks danjackson9 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 60 84 8
NBL Perth Wildcats CatsTM 29-Jul-10 26 84 8
NRL Gold Coast Titans Aaron_Cannings (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 3 81 11
AIS New South Wales Institute of Sport theNSWIS (official) 29-Jul-10 259 80 0
NBL Townsville Crocodiles JoshJenkins24 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 59 75 8
Volleyball Australia Volleyball SA mmurpha (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 113 74 2
AFL Richmond Tigers yellow_n_black (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 4 74 8
A-League Sydney FC SydneyFC 29-Jul-10 0 73 4
Semi Professional Basketball League Semi Professional Basketball League SEABL 29-Jul-10 12 70 8
AFL Melbourne Demons demonwiki (fansite) 29-Jul-10 70 69 1
AFL Canberra Sydney Swans Reserves swansreserves 29-Jul-10 24 67 4
NBL Perth Wildcats Cats_Coach 29-Jul-10 11 67 4
U18 National Championships Western Australia U18s team WA_U18s 29-Jul-10 9 67 1
NBL Adelaide 36ers BenFitz (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 54 66 7
U18 National Championships Victoria U18s team VicMetroU18s 29-Jul-10 4 66 2
NBL Perth Wildcats CatsWagstaff 29-Jul-10 10 65 5
U18 National Championships Tasmania U18s team TasU18s 29-Jul-10 7 64 1
NBL Adelaide 36ers 36ers (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 16 60 11
U18 National Championships South Australia U18s team SA_U18s 29-Jul-10 8 60 2
NRL NRL womeninleague 29-Jul-10 15 59 6
Australian Baseball League Australian Baseball League ABLeague 29-Jul-10 5 58 3
NBL Perth Wildcats CatsGear 29-Jul-10 35 57 2
U18 National Championships Victoria U18s team VicCountryU18s 29-Jul-10 5 57 2
Claxton Shield Barbagallo Perth Heat PerthHeat 29-Jul-10 23 56 4
U18 National Championships Northern Territory U18s team NT_U18s 29-Jul-10 16 55 1
U18 National Championships Queensland U18s team QldU18s 29-Jul-10 5 54 1
NBL Perth Wildcats CatsTickets 29-Jul-10 7 53 5
NBL South (Melbourne) Dragons SAVEOURDRAGONS (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 54 51 3
UCI Continental Team (Oceania Region) Team Jayco Skins / Cycling Australia AlexCarver91 (athlete) 29-Jul-10 71 50 3
AFL Collingwood Magpies VictoriaParkHC (grounds) 29-Jul-10 21 50 2
AFL Sydney Swans RTTF_AU (fansite) 29-Jul-10 99 47 5
NSW Premier League Manly United ManlyUnited 29-Jul-10 26 46 5
NBL Townsville Crocodiles willo43 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 24 46 6
U18 National Championships New South Wales U18s team NSWACT_Rams 29-Jul-10 7 46 1
AFL Greater Western Sydney ACT4GWS 29-Jul-10 40 44 1
WNBL Bendio Spirit bendigospirit 29-Jul-10 31 43 4
NRL Parramatta Eels parraeels (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 0 42 4
NBL Perth Wildcats CatsCommunity 29-Jul-10 79 41 3
NBL Townsville Crocodiles Kegs42 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 43 40 7
AIHL AIHL hnim (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 2 40 4
AFL Essendon Bombers bomberblitz (player) 29-Jul-10 19 38 1
AIHL AIHL hockeypulse (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 20 36 2
Australian Cross Country Ski Team Australian Cross Country Ski Team AUS_XC (official) 29-Jul-10 6 35 4
Netball New South Wales Petersham RUFC Netball Club PetershamNetbal 29-Jul-10 13 34 5
Brisbane Netball Association ACE Netball Club ACENetball 29-Jul-10 3 33 5
WNBL Dandenong Jayco Rangers JaycoRangers 29-Jul-10 1 32 7
Plenty Valley Netball Association Orcas Netball Orcas_Netball 29-Jul-10 2 31 8
NBL Gold Coast Blaze Vandy21 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 8 30 9
AFL Fremantle Dockers bc8977 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 10 22 7
Cycling Australia Velo Canberra velocanberra 29-Jul-10 24 20 0
NBL Perth Wildcats Cats_Media 29-Jul-10 11 20 2
VFL Port Melbourne Borough BoroughBoy (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 2 20 12
W-League W-League abcwleague (media outlet) 29-Jul-10 15 19 4
AFL Essendon Bombers jreynojreyno (player) 29-Jul-10 16 18 1
NBL Perth Wildcats nickmarvin (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 5 16 2
NBL Townsville Crocodiles ToffCedar (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 39 15 5
AIS University of Canberra National Institute of Sport Studies ucniss (official) 29-Jul-10 20 14 1
NBL Townsville Crocodiles cameronwhiting (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 11 13 6
WNBL Logan Thunder loganthunder 29-Jul-10 2 11 6
Triathlon TriathlonTSO TriathlonTSO 29-Jul-10 35 9 0
Tennis Australia Tennis Canberra tenniscanberra (official) 29-Jul-10 9 8 0
NBL Adelaide 36ers brad_393 (unofficial) 29-Jul-10 10 7 3
AFLNT AFLNT Chippa39 (official) 29-Jul-10 15 4 0
Gridiron Australia Nationals Perth Blitz perthblitz 29-Jul-10 0 1 2

One of the comments included links to several Australian athletes on Twitter that I had missed. Some of these athletes aren’t active in Australian leagues so they don’t necessarily really fit well with most of the people and leagues on the list… but included below for interest. Any more names of people, leagues and clubs I’m missing, let me know. :)

Service League Team Account Date collected Following Followers Lists
Twitter First class cricket Victorian Bushrangers AndrewMcDonald4 (Andrew McDonald) 30-Jul-10 16 199 8
Twitter V8 Supercars jamiewhincup (Jamie Whincup) 30-Jul-10 14 2,446 158
Twitter Basketball Australia Australian Boombers AndrewMBogut (Andrew Bogut) 30-Jul-10 175 25,068 1,292
Twitter AFL Essendon Bombers JasonJohnson14 (former Essendon AFL player) 30-Jul-10 17 461 18
Twitter AFL Essendon Bombers SteveAlessio (former Essendon AFL player) 30-Jul-10 145 943 63
Twitter First class cricket Victorian Bushrangers warne888 30-Jul-10 89 129,802 3,137

Related Posts:

AFL fan community sentiment: Are fans happy or sad?

Posted by Laura on Sunday, 25 July, 2010

I generally don’t believe in sentiment analysis.  I tend to think it is junk because so much of automated sentiment analysis misses contextual clues, relying too heavily on keywords.  Sentiment analysis also tends to give sentiment to bot generated posts and to posts that are neutral.  Despite this, I thought it might be a bit interesting to try to do a sentiment analysis of the AFL fan community on Twitter.  Are they happy or are they sad?  And later, where are the happy fans and where are the sad fans?

The first step in doing that was to collect a whole bunch of AFL related tweets using searchtastic.  I’m currently up around 3,400 tweets. (When/If I do the geolocation version, I’ll provide the raw data set.)  The second step was to develop a list of AFL specific sentiment related words.  In my case, I’m just going with the characteristic of happy and sad to make this easier.  My sentiment keyword list is as follows:

Happy Sad
Best Worst
Win Spoon
happy lose
excited sucks
smile awful
star sackermanis
brownlo fired
medal suspended
victory fouled
club song sad
pride upset
won fail
congrats heartbreak
Purchased lost
lucky Sold
success Desperate
champions blow it
Fit blew it
Riewolt damn
glad avoid
legend unlucky
star failed
brilliant Akermanis
cruised slammed
hope injured
strained
medical
ugly
suspension
crisis
stumble
tribunal
poor
loss
wounded

The next step was to give a happy or sad label for tweets that included these terms. The last step was to count up how many Tweets were labeled Happy, Happy / Sad, Sad, No Sentiment.  I generated the following table:

Tweets % % – None
Happy 704 21% 55%
Happy / Sad 147 4% 11%
Sad 436 13% 34%
No Sentiment 2128 62%
Total 3415
Total 1287

Later, I’m hoping to match this sentiment with the geographic location of the tweets to find out where the pockets of AFL happiness are versus the pockets of AFL sadness are.

Related Posts:

Australian elections: The geography of Twitter

Posted by Laura on Monday, 19 July, 2010

I wanted to create a map of where people who were following Australian political candidates and/or tweeting about the Australian elections were living. I’ve been getting similar data for Australian sport teams and this feels like a natural extension. I’m not doing an analysis of this data and these maps because while I feel I know enough about Australian sport to draw conclusions, I don’t feel comfortable with Australian politics. If some one else wants to do that or use my raw data, please feel free.

Just as a caveat, this is a limited data set that was collected on the morning of July 19, 2010. I used a tool to mine this and the amount of data included was based on what that tool gave me.

Data Collection Methodology

  1. Identify the major candidates in the Australian elections on Twitter (Tony Abbot, Bob Brown, Julia Gillard) and some of the more popular search phrases and hash tags used by Twitter users (#alp vote, #aus2010, #ausvotes, #laborfail, #myliberal, #nocleanfeed , #qanda, Abbott-Gillard, asylum boat, Gillard, Greens Canberra, Krudd Labor, Labor Liberals, Rudd Liberals, Tony Abbott, Truss LNP, Warren Truss, WorkChoices)
  2. Go to http://www.searchtastic.com/ , run a search for those phrases and accounts. Export results to an Excel spread sheet. (Total tweets picked up: 27,506)
  3. Create a new sheet. Copy and paste only those Tweets by people that list a location. (Total tweets included: 26,198)
  4. Using location information from profiles, try to determine the city, state, country that the person lives in. Example: Melbourne = Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. ChiTown = Chicago, Illinois, United States. Brizzy = Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 32.38504,-83.647406 = Perry, Georgia, United States. Oz = Australia.



View full map

Methodology: Gillard, Abbot, Brown, Truss

  1. On Excel, turn AutoFilter on.
  2. Filter the Tweet column to contain one of the following terms: Gillard, Abbot, Brown, Truss
  3. Copy and paste the City, State, Country columns to a new worksheet. Select those columns on the new worksheet.
  4. Sort data by city. Remove all locations that do not include City information.
  5. Go to Advance Filter. Copy the Unique Records to Another Location.
  6. Using a COUNTIF formula, count the number of tweets that mentioned the term by city.
  7. Go to http://www.batchgeo.com/ and copy paste the city, state, column, count in the box for step 1. Click on the Map Now button.
  8. When Geocoder is finished running, select the Show Geocode button, and copy and paste that data to an Excel worksheet. Save each politician’s tweet references on its own CSV file.
  9. Go to http://finder.geocommons.com/ and import each csv file. Finish processing each file using latitude and longitude coordinates.

Go to http://maker.geocommons.com/ and create one map for all four politicians. Use visual theme, sizes.

Please note this map is based on total tweets by location. It is not total individuals who tweeted with the selected keyword.



View full map

Methodology: Labor, Liberals, Greens, National Party
This methodology is a repeat of the previous except the names of the politicians are replaced with the names of the parties.



View full map

Methodology: Education, Work Choices, Asylum
This methodology is a repeat of the previous except the keywords are: Education OR Schools, Work Choices OR WorkChoices, Immigrant OR Asylum, NTB or Broadband, Environment OR Global Warming, Health OR Doctor, Afghanistan OR Diggers.

Other: Follows
I’m planning on adding two maps to this post tomorrow. One shows the location of followers for Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard and Bob Brown. The other map will include location of tweets relating to certain issues.

Related Posts:

AFL team related Tweets by location

Posted by Laura on Saturday, 17 July, 2010

After I did A map of Team GWS on Facebook, which included a comment in the follow up about Twitter location, I wanted to do a similar map for other AFL teams using Twitter.

The problem is I can’t easily get all the follower data on Twitter in a way that is easy for me to work with. Instead, I used a tool called Searchtastic to get profile information about people who mentioned specific keywords in their Tweets. Searchtastic pulls that information from Twitter’s Search API and then outputs in Excel. Each Twitter search I did I related to a team: #gosaints for St. Kilda, Lions AFL for the Brisbane lions. (I tried to do at least three Twitter searches for each team to maximize my data set size.) The raw data used in this post can be found at AFLTweets.xls. After that was done, I went through the location field and determined the city, state, country for everyone who had listed a location. I then chose a few teams, added up how many references by city and created the map below. With the particular tool I’m using, I can only add about 7 or 8 teams before I can’t add more. The teams in this sample include: Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Lions, Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies, Geelong Cats, and St. Kilda Saints.



View full map

Things that strike me as interesting: No one from the Northern Territories and only one person from Tasmania and the ACT tweeted about the AFL. Is this because they have less internet access, fewer people, use social networks other than Twitter, or aren’t interested in AFL and these particular clubs? Western Australia also had tiny representation here with the max people per team from the city being one. The state has two teams but fans of the league in the state weren’t mentioning any of the competition. What also strikes me as interesting is that interest in the AFL in Queensland only goes as far north as Maroochydore. Beyond that, nothing. Brisbane suburbs are also largely absent. I should finish the rest of the teams and see if I can’t get a bigger data set to see if that effects the results at all.

Related Posts:

Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)

Posted by Laura on Saturday, 12 June, 2010

This is the third post in a series of creative research data dumps that relate to the Socceroos.

LinkedIn

League Team Name URL Owner Members Type Access Created Date checked
World Cup Soccer Socceroos Australian Socceroos – Supporters in Business http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1155907 Luis Aleixo 6 Networking Group 1-Nov-08 15-May-10
World Cup Soccer Socceroos Australian Socceroos – Supporters in Business http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1155907 Luis Aleixo 6 Networking Group 1-Nov-08 3-Jun-10

LiveJournal and clones

Service League Interest Date checked People Communities
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 102
Dreamwidth World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 3
Blurty World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 0
InsaneJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 3
DeadJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 1
JournalFen World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 0
scribbld World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 0
Inksome World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 0
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 15-May-10 102
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer australian national soccer team 15-May-10 0
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer aussie national football team 15-May-10 0
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 28-May-10 102
Dreamwidth World Cup Soccer Socceroos 28-May-10 3
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 3-Jun-10 102 6
Dreamwidth World Cup Soccer Socceroos 7-Jun-10 3 0

This table looks at activity patterns for LJ comms…

Service League Interest Date checked Community name Created on Last updated Comments received Account type Journal entries Tags Memories Virtual gifts Userpics Maintainers Members Watched by
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 the_socceroos 23-Jun-06 Never updated 0 Basic 0 0 0 0 0 1 3 4
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 tim_cahill 18-Nov-05 1-Jul-07 83 Basic 26 0 0 0 1 1 29 25
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 ozsoccer 1-Jun-06 20-May-08 620 Basic 78 0 0 0 3 1 76 65
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 14-May-10 harrykewell_7 4-Jan-07 3-Nov-08 271 Basic 137 13 0 0 5 1 72 68
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 28-May-10 tim_cahill 18-Nov-05 1-Jul-07 83 Basic 26 0 0 0 1 1 29 25
LiveJournal World Cup Soccer Socceroos 28-May-10 the_socceroos 23-Jun-06 Never updated 0 Basic 0 0 0 0 0 1 3 4
LiveJournal AFL Brisbane Broncos 1-Jun-10 brisbanelions 30-Apr-05 30-Apr-05 1 Basic 0 0 0 0 0 1 5 6

MySpace

Service League Interest People Artists Music Videos Albums Songs Videos Images Date gathered
MySpace World Cup Soccer Socceroos 20 12 1 1 1 66 500 14-May-10

Age break down of some accounts’s friends…

League Team Account Date checked Total friends Age: 18-24 Age: 25-29 Age: 30-35 Age: 36-40 Age: 40+
World Cup Socceroos socceroos 28-May-10 769 303 125 42 11 66
Women’s World Cup Matildas matildasonline 28-May-10 8 5 1 2 0 0

Orkut

Service League Team Interest Users Communities Topics Date gathered Notes
orkut World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 36 14 628 5-Jun-10
orkut World Cup All Whites "All Whites" 14 1 319 5-Jun-10 Not all references are to the football team.
orkut Women’s World Cup Matildas Matildas 14 2 124 5-Jun-10 Not all references are to the football team.

Twitter
Looking for growth information…

Service League Team Account Date collected Total followers
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 8-Mar-10 353
Twitter World Cup Socceroos socceroos_news (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 1 099
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 28-May-10 1 952
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 29-May-10 1965
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 30-May-10 1 998
Twitter World Cup Socceroos socceroos_news (unofficial) 30-May-10 1 668
Twitter World Cup Socceroos socceroos_news (unofficial) 1-Jun-10 1907
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 1-Jun-10 2077
Twitter World Cup Socceroos GGArmy (unofficial) 2-Jun-10 357
Twitter World Cup Socceroos socceroos_news (unofficial) 2-Jun-10 1 701
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 2-Jun-10 2 165
Twitter World Cup Socceroos HalfTimeHeroes (soccer fansite) 9-Jun-10 293
Twitter World Cup Socceroos GGArmy (unofficial) 10-Jun-10 390
Twitter World Cup Socceroos socceroos_news (unofficial) 10-Jun-10 1 775
Twitter World Cup Socceroos Socceroos 10-Jun-10 2 661
Twitter World Cup Socceroos HalfTimeHeroes (soccer fansite) 10-Jun-10 293

YouTube

Service League Interest Videos Date gathered
YouTube World Cup Soccer Socceroos 1 760 14-May-10
YouTube World Cup Soccer "All Blacks" 13 200 14-May-10
YouTube Basketball Australia Australian Boomers 98 14-May-10
YouTube Basketball Australia Australian Opals 538 14-May-10
YouTube World Cup Soccer "All Whites" 429 14-May-10

Related Posts: