One of the themes touched on in Chitra Ramaswamy’s article on EdTwinge and Festbuzz in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday was whether acts with a large Twitter following are naturally advantaged when it comes to crowdsourced review services like ours.

The same issue was raised in rather more direct fashion when our mate Sal sent us the message below…

Sort your "Carr"ma out

“Noise” is the operative word when it comes to acts like Jimmy Carr. He has just shy of 200,000 followers who are (with some justification) hanging on his every word and waiting for the next opportunity to interact with him. That interaction generates an awful lot of noise. Set up a Twitter search for @jimmycarr and just watch those tweets come rolling in.

EdTwinge measures noise. But it has to be relevant noise. Noise that is relevant to the Fringe. Noise that gives an indication of “happeningness” around an act at the Fringe.

The easiest way to determine which noise is relevant is via hashtags such as #edfringe, #edtwinge and #festbuzz, amongst others. Provided people are using these appropriately they are a good indicator of relevant noise.

But not everyone uses hashtags and we want to be as comprehensive as possible in terms of monitoring and analysing everything that is being said about Fringe shows on Twitter. And, especially for established Twitter celebrities like Jimmy Carr, that is the crowdsourced review equivalent of skiing off-piste.

We have a comprehensive (but not entirely perfect) database of Fringe shows and performers that we can monitor mentions of.

We have also been manually establishing an ever growing database of “nicknames” that real people use to refer to the shows on Twitter.

And, yes, we can monitor mentions of performers’ @names.

For acts like Jimmy Carr, the latter approach affords both opportunities and problems. Many fans who are seeing him perform in Edinburgh will also be existing followers of his on Twitter. These people are more likely to refer to his show as @jimmycarr than Jimmy Carr or Rapier Wit – “Saw @jimmycarr at EICC last night. Brilliant!”

So if we actively monitor @jimmycarr we pretty much guarantee to pick up everything that his fans are saying about his Edinburgh shows. But we also guarantee to pick up everything and anything that his fans are saying about or to him, the vast majority of which has nothing to do with the Fringe. This means that we have to be cute about how we apply additional filters to maximise relevant noise and minimise the extraneous stuff. To this end we’ve been experimenting  with alternative approaches all through the Fringe – not just with Mr Carr it should be said.

Depending on how we have those filters set up we either open the floodgates to a deluge of (for our purposes) irrelevant crap, or we can over-zealously ‘prune’ an act’s mentions back to the ground. To be honest, the experimenting continues and we haven’t got it exactly right yet as Ms Salidatious so nicely points out. Indeed, at the moment, it is quite possible that Jimmy Carr is suffering from his Twitter celebrity rather than benefiting from it as far as EdTwinge is concerned.

We’re not going to divulge exactly how we’re currently filtering but suffice to say that our attitude to relevant noise is loosely related to the main currency for EdTwinge – namely Karma. Karma is a statistically robust measure of net positivity of sentiment that has been expressed about an act on Twitter.

For us Twingers (pronounced with a soft “g”) the learning we’re gaining from continually adjusting our filters is one of the main benefits of the whole exercise. EdTwinge is a non-commercial venture, but the engine behind it has undoubted commercial potential in the future and we need to get these things right.

We aim to be useful but do not claim to be perfect.

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