Well, this is it — FestBuzz is finally here! After weeks of preparation, we’re offering you the chance to find out what people really think at the Edinburgh Festivals.

What is FestBuzz?

FestBuzz is a site created by Affect Labs and supported by Channel 4’s 4iP fund as well as Festivals Edinburgh.

Our mission is to make it easier for people at the Edinburgh Festivals to find out how good shows are. We’re doing this by aggregating word of mouth from Twitter and running it through our language processing engines to figure out what your tweets are really saying about Festival shows.

In short, we’re figuring out a star rating for all the tweets about a show and giving this information to you — so you can save time and money, find shows that might be overlooked, and generally have an easier time of it at the Festivals this year.

Why are we different?

There’s no shortage of Festival sites and listings providers out there, but we hope the bit above helps you understand why we’re a step further. We have overworked robots out night and day searching for relevant mentions of Festival shows, matching them up with their subjects and then working out how positive and negative they are. (By the way, that’s what Affect Labs is all about; we don’t just do Festivals!).

How can I use FestBuzz?

Glad you asked. As well as the main audience site, which lets you discover show ratings and conversation, we’re also providing a dashboard to people who want more concrete behind-the-scenes information; for example, how popular your specific show is, if you’re a promoter.

We’re also opening up a data feed and embeddable widget (we like to call it the BuzzBox) to select partners, and we have several lined up ready to go; if you’re interested in either of these, or just want to play around with our data, contact Annette and we’ll see what we can do. (As well as email, you can get in touch on 0131 668 6906, or on Twitter — of course! — at @festbuzz.)

What’s in store during the Festivals?

As well as keeping our systems happily churning out crowdsourced reviews during the Festivals, we’re going to have a ton of cool stuff going on here on the blog, and in Edinburgh itself. Watch this space for news, reviews, previews, interviews and anything else we can find that ends in ‘ws’. Plus, ticket giveaways, the Twitter’s Choice awards and of course the Edinburgh Fringe Tweetup!