FestBuzz

Chris Cox wins FestBuzz’s Twit­ter of the Year award at Edin­burgh Fringe 2009

Fes­t­Buzz have awarded Chris Cox, the com­edy men­tal­ist magi­cian, the first ever com­edy Twit­ter of the Year Award at Mervyn Stutter’s Pick of the Fringe.

Cox has been given this prize for his cre­ative and pro­lific use of Twit­ter which has helped gar­ner him almost 3,000 fol­low­ers on the site, and ensured his pop­u­lar­ity at this year’s Fringe fes­ti­val with his show Mind Over Pat­ter. He has tweeted around 300 times this August, con­vers­ing with fans and fel­low come­di­ans about com­edy, the inter­net and his show. Chris’ online name is @bigcox, and his mind-reading and magic show com­bines other new social media such as Face­book to cre­ate some excel­lent tricks for his audience.

Fes­t­Buzz is a new way to find cool stuff at the Edin­burgh Fes­ti­vals. It’s a project from Affect Labs, a data pro­cess­ing com­pany based in Edin­burgh, and is sup­ported by Chan­nel 4’s 4iP fund. Fes­t­Buzz aggre­gates “tweets” about shows and then uses sen­ti­ment detec­tion to cre­ate a star rat­ing for the act: reviews are crowd-sourced directly from the peo­ple who are see­ing the shows, rather than critics.

Twit­ter has become an inter­net sen­sa­tion in the last 8 months: func­tion­ing a lit­tle like Face­book sta­tus updates, you sim­ply tell the site what you’re doing (in 140 char­ac­ters or less) and then read what other peo­ple are doing from their “tweets”. The attrac­tion of Twit­ter is fol­low­ing other inter­est­ing or famous people’s tweets about their lives, cre­at­ing a stream of con­scious­ness type feed which illus­trates the chang­ing mood of the moment.

The prize will be pre­sented to Chris Cox at Mervyn Stutter’s Pick of the Fringe show start­ing at 1pm on Thurs­day 27th August. Stut­ter has been run­ning the revue since 1992 and will be pre­sent­ing his own Spirit of the Fringe awards on Sun­day 30th August.

http://www.festbuzz.com/