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/

Hello! You’ve probably come to this post from the @FestBuzz Twitter page, in which case you probably know your way around Twitter already (if not, check here).

We’ll be picking up on show review tweets throughout the Festival. We’ve got the complete listings for the entire Festival, so if it’s on — we’ve got it covered.

Just use Twitter as you would normally do, include the name of the show and let the world know what you think. If you’ve got space in your message, include the #FestBuzz hashtag, which will make doubly certain we pick up your tweet.

Check this tweet for a good example.

What makes us special is that once we’ve seen your tweet, our unique sentiment analysis engine will judge how positive or negatively your message is (you’d be suprised how difficult that is!) and then uses it to create democratic ratings for each show.

Then make sure you check out the FestBuzz website before you choose the next show to see.

The Festival tweets are already starting to flow so we look forward to seeing yours!

Image from FestBuzz Flickr stream

The problem was a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS), so the culprits were likely some kids with too much time on their hands.

Anyway, while almost everything to do with Twitter was inaccessible, it was still possible to read tweets for a while using the Twitter Search page. What was interesting is that it was still possible to post tweets by sending them in as text messages.

So if international cyber-warware erupts again during the Festival, fear not! You can still send your review tweets in by text message and we’ll pick them up once a cease-fire is declared! Just go to the devices page in Twitter and register your phone number. You’ll then have to send a unique code once to verify your phone number. After that you can send tweets to your account by sending a text. Just be sure to store Twitter’s phone number in your phone.

In other news we’ve started picking up lots of show review tweets! We’re just tightening a few nuts and blots here and there on our unique sentiment analysis engine, but we’ll be ready to start giving you the word on the tweet soon. Watch this space!

/edit OK, ummm, so I decided to wipe my mobile phone number from Twitter and set it up again, just to make sure it was as easy as I remembered. But it seems like Twitter text *is* broken now! They’re still recovering from the DDoS attack. I suspect any messages sent will get through eventually, but it *was* working earlier when all else was failing. Ho-hum, such is the Internet.

To be fair it wasn’t the shortest of posts, which is a bit ironic really, so for those of you with Twitter-like attention spans, here is my easy guide to becoming a FestBuzz reviewer in 140 characters:

Become a #festbuzz reviewer: 1)Visit www.Twitter.com 2)Register 3)Register phone 4)Go to Festival show 5)Enjoy(or not) 6)Tweet review by txt

and here is my tweet to prove it.

(remember if you’re sending a tweet by txt, to make your review 140 characters or less and include the show name!)

Looking forward to seeing the tweets pour in!

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.