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.

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!