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/