Ozzie Sport

The Bendigo Spirit are a WNBL team based in Bendigo, Victoria. There aren’t many videos featuring the team on Youtube. I’ve found a total of four uploaded by three people. Of these four videos, two were uploaded in June 2008 and two were uploaded in October 2009. Dates for video uploading thus appear random or likely coincide with the start and end of the WNBL season.  The two June videos were uploaded by an account that was probably created by the team, where no one as logged into it in the past three months. The other two videos were uploaded by two different individuals.  Both of those individuals were interested in Australian basketball: Luuuc who has a lot of NBL videos and bbax222 who has a lot of Australian national basketball team videos and WNBL related videos.  The most views for a video was BENDIGO BANK SPIRIT: Kelly Wilson with 171 one views as of March 25, 2010.   It was uploaded by bbax222.

Demographic data for these YouTube members is sparse.  All that is really known is that all three are based in Australia.  This contrasts a fair bit to some other Australian teams and social networks where people outside the country make up part of the community.  This YouTube uploading community also accounts for the largest population of Bendigo Spirit fans I’ve found on the networks I’ve looked at so far: There is one account on MySpace and one account on bebo. (There are two fan pages for the team on Facebook.  One has 165 members and the other has 83 members.  I just count Facebook people based on the number of people listing a team as an interest, not based on fan page membership.  And after looking at one of those pages, they do have an official Twitter account with 20 followers.  Go follow the Bendigo Spirit on Twitter! Support women’s sport!)

Given that the biggest community of people appears to be on YouTube and that YouTube is the second biggest search engine out there, it would probably behoove the Spirit to go back to using YouTube more actively.

Related Posts:

• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Townsville Fire on YouTube
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Claxton Shield on Twitter

Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location map

Related Posts:

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

I’ve been reading a number of blogs including floatingsheep.org and Pete Warden’s blog.  Both of them occassionally have very pretty charts, the likes of which I would like to make on my own to geographic map patterns for Australian sports culture.  Some of the maps that geographers do to look at social patterns are just fascinating in the extreme.

One of these geography related maps looked at YouTube.  This inspired me to look at YouTube.  I quickly realized that for big, popular teams, looking at YouTube would not be very useful.  I do all my data mining by hand.  (This includes looking up things like Brizzy and Wellywood after getting the data tableized to be able to identify a person as living in Brisbane, Queensland and Wellington, New Zealand.)  It is time consuming.  For smaller teams though, it seemed like the sample was small enough that I could get some interesting data off YouTube.  This only includes videos, not playlists.  At a later time, this may change.

This is both correct and incorrect.  It turns out that most people are not listing their hometown on YouTube.  They will often list their country though.

Anyway, the methodology I decided to use for YouTube data gathering was as follows: Search the team name.  Find videos that pertain directly to that team.  Look at and record the profile information for all individuals who have a video which mention that team.  This should give an idea as to league interest and team interest, though not always.  You can get say a Geelong Cats fan who uploads a video where the Geelong Cats play the Hawthorn Hawks and because of how I’m searching, they’d be included for both teams. It can be make interests slightly misleading, though fans of both teams will probably watch a video labeled that way.

One problem I’ve discovered (and I’m starting with the least popular teams first) involves the Geelong Cats.  I’ve mentioned them before as they are problematic in that their VFL team shares the same name.  Unlike LiveJournal and bebo where interest search makes it hard/impossible to separate the two, it is a bit more doable on YouTube as all you have to do is add a VFL to the search.  Except, well, the VFL was the precursor to the AFL and there are a fair number of videos for the VFL Geelong Cats in the days before the AFL existed.  I can separate these out a bit… but I’m opting not to at the moment.  If a video mentions the VFL Geelong Cats in the days before the AFL, I’ll count the person who uploaded it under both the AFL and VFL.

I feel like I should almost be recording information about specific videos on YouTube but that doesn’t feel practical.  It might be worth noting the total number of videos like I’m noting the information about mailing list volume for Yahoo!Groups.  I may eventually do that, but at the moment, it isn’t a priority.  I’m more interested in demographic information of people uploading videos than in the history of these videos themselves.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

The Claxton Shield is the premiere competition in for baseball in Australia.  It is organized by the Australian Baseball Federation and includes the Perth Heat, Victoria Aces, New South Wales Patriots, Queensland Rams teams.  The competition is the one of the main things that has been consistent in the baseball community with two leagues having become defunct.

Looking around, the Australian baseball community does not appear to have a stronghold on social networks like bebo,blogger or LiveJournal.  They do however have a small presence on Twitter: The extent of which is the account run by the Perth Heat.  The team has 35 followers.  Twitter Analyzer seems a bit off with their count for where followers come from for the team.  It says that the Heat have 36 American followers, 4 Dutch followers, 4 Irish followers, 12 followers from Ecuador and 32 followers from Australians.  Stats like those are why I have a huge problem with Twitter Analyzer but I’m not sure what tool does a better job at counting.  The Perth Heat do a fairly good job at updating regularly, providing scores, links to updated rosters and their social profiles elsewhere.  (They link to their Facebook fanpage, where they have 1,110 fans.)  The one thing they don’t do particularly well is interact.

It seems like Twitter would be a great potential tool for Claxton Shield and its teams to market itself as Twitter ranks 12th in Australia according to Alexa.  Second tier sports should definitely contemplate using it, in combination with YouTube and Facebook, to promote themselves so they can reach a wider audience.  People can accidentally find their content through @ replies, retweets, related videos that can help develop more organic interest in them.  If Australia is ever going to get another league like ABL and IBLA and have it be successful, this sort of thing needs to be done.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• A social media/web snapshot of Collingwood, Hawthorn and Port Adelaide
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders