FestBuzz Photo Competition: Show us your Festival

For each day one week we’ll be giving one lucky FestBuzz Facebook fan a pair of tickets to a show of their choice (subject to availability) for sending us the best picture that sums up their festival.

We’re allowing 3 photos from each user every day, so to enter simply join our Facebook group (search FestBuzz in the Facebook to find us or click the link below), and upload a photo.

We want photos that sum up your festival experience– regardless of where or when in Edinburgh that’s happening. FestBuzz is covering all the Festivals, not just the Fringe, so if you’re enjoying the Art or Book Festival let us know about it by tweeting about it using the tag #festbuzz or uploading a picture to our Facebook group.

Not only will the best picture win the photographer a pair of tickets, but we’ll also feature it on our blog as well at http://blog.festbuzz.com

We’re not worried about high quality images, though it would help if we can tell what the pictures are of, but the subject can be anything Edinburgh Festivals based, so be creative!

Get snapping and get uploading!

But first: Become a fan!

FestBuzz on Facebook

You’ve maybe come along to the FestBuzz website to look for Edinburgh Festival show reviews after meeting one of our team out in the streets of Edinburgh, or maybe you’ve been encouraged to “tweet” your opinion about a show you’ve just seen. You might have read about Twitter recently or heard it mentioned on the news but been left wondering, “What is this Twitter thing anyway?”

So what is it then?

Twitter is real-time messaging, or “micro-blogging”, in messages of 140 characters or less. Unlike the more established “blogging”, on Twitter there’s no room for rambling (such as in this post!). So basically you write a short message, click a button, then it’s published on your profile page at Twitter.com. Like this chap for example.

As you send Twitter messages, or “tweets” as they’re usually called, you build up a chronological timeline of messages. You can follow other Twitter users and in turn be followed yourself. The tweets of all the people you are following appear in your personal timeline as they are sent, just as your tweets appear in the timelines of those people that are following you. The result is a flow of real-time messages from those people that you follow.

Why bother?

Fair question! I think the answer to that depends on who you ask — Twitter represents different things to different people. For me it represents a stream of consciousness for the Internet.

Twitter used to say it was asking the question, “What are you doing?” To me, it’s really about “What am I thinking?” When you really want to share something with more than just the nearest person you can find, you can tell Twitter and instantly you have told the world.

Twitter can be great for sharing opinions about things (like Edinburgh Festival shows!), sharing news stories, interesting websites or even asking for help with something. If you’ve ever fancied having your writings on the Internet, but don’t have the time or the inclination to write a blog regularly (like myself), then Twitter is for you!

How do I get started?

The easiest way to start is to pop over to Twitter.com, pick a username and register an account. You can do this from your computer or from a web-enabled mobile phone. Once you’ve registered there are a few different ways you can use Twitter. When I’m on my computer I tend to just use the website, but many people use one of the desktop applications such as Tweetdeck. They offer extra features, such as being able to group the people you follow in to groups, e.g. comedians, politicians, journalists, people I actually know in real life, etc.

Twitter can also be used from mobile phones in one of a couple of ways. Once you’re in your account, you can register your mobile phone number and send tweets via text (SMS) messages sent to a special number. If you’ve got a smartphone, you can use one of the many Twitter applications out there. I use TwitterBerry on my Blackberry and Twitterfon on my iPhone.

Anything else I need to know?

It helps to understand another few things — replies, retweets and hashtags.

Replies involve using the “@” character before a person’s username in a message. You can do it with a new message to “mention” someone or to reply to one of their tweets. They then get alerted that someone has replied (or mentioned) to them. The website and all the applications help you do this. Example from @stephenfry: @mjpeanut Well, it presented Walter as a kind of conceptual artist. there was nudity, weirdness and avant garde bonkersosity.

Retweets are when you want to repeat something someone has tweeted. Perhaps because you agree with it and want your followers to the see the message, whilst still acknowledging the original author. To do this you just copy the original message, include an “@” reply to the author and put “RT” at the start of your message. Again, most applications will help you do this. Example from @kejames: RT @Astro_127 Just landed in Houston. Looking forward to seeing family, friends, and colleagues.

Hashtags are a way of indicating that your tweet is about a topic. You can make up any hashtag you like by putting a “#” in front of a word. People very quickly start using the same hashtags for prominent topics.Example from @WEWS AP: A judge has granted Katherine Jackson a monthly allowance from her son’s estate. #MichaelJackson.

How do I send my show review to FestBuzz?

Simples! Our little army of robots is scouring Twitter looking for mentions of festival shows. Just send a tweet, saying what you thought of the show and include the name of the show. To be extra certain that we pick it up, please use the #FestBuzz hashtag.

I said before that Twitter can be a bit like a stream of consciousness. Well, the current can get a little strong sometimes so Festbuzz will be reading all these tweets then using our unique software to understand the emotion in them so we can automatically assign ratings to shows. Clever, eh?

Is that it?

Aye, that’s about it. Just give it a go! Start by following a few people (Stephen Fry seems to be the UK’s biggest Twitter celebrity). You don’t have to be sending tweets every day to take part — just send them as and when you have something to share. Of course you should follow FestBuzz, you can follow me if you like (no great insights there!) and check out Jennie Lees, the brains behind Festbuzz.

and finally…

Twitter is great for sharing links to interesting webpages, but 140 characters can easily be taken up by a long URL. There are several services, such as bit.ly, which will take long URLs and shorten them to something more manageable and Twitter friendly (you can also post directly to Twitter from within bit.ly).

You can also easily upload photos from your mobile phone and share them via Twitter. Check out Twitpic for starters. The first pictures of the US Airways plane crash into New York’s Hudson river were uploaded to Twitpic.

Anyone that’s also using Facebook might want to check out this.

If you’ve got any questions about using Twitter, please feel free to leave them in the comments section and we’ll do our best to help out.