FestBuzz

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!