EdTwinge is a Twitter-based, crowdsourced, realtime Edinburgh Fringe rating application.

It monitors tweets that mention any of the acts at the 2009 Fringe Festival and/or the most commonly used Fringe hashtags. It then matches the content of these tweets against an extensive database of positive and negative words and phrases.

The site publishes two scores for each act at the Fringe. The first is “Noise”. This is simply the number of tweets that have mentioned the act in an Edinburgh/Fringe context. The second, and more important, measure is what we call “Karma”.

A full, geek-friendly explanation of how Karma is calculated can be found on the Edtwinge site. But basically it is a measure of the net positive sentiment about each act, which is based on a robust statistical analysis. This statistical analysis ensures that the Karma score is as reliable as possible. For instance an act mentioned in, say, five tweets, all of which are positive will have a significantly lower karma score than an act mentioned positively in 60 tweets out of 70. Phrases are prioritised over words, so “shit-hot” would be correctly identified as a positive statement for instance.

The top ten tables for the Fringe as a whole, and for each genre of show, are primarily derived from Karma. Noise only comes into play if two shows have the same Karma rating. In this instance the act with the higher noise score would rank above the other.

The site also allows the user to search and view karma and noise scores for any act, and to view in chronological order the verbatim tweets that underpin these.

EdTwinge is also the result of a garage-band style collaboration with some very talented, sparky and creative people.

Mike Coulter – social media exponent at Digital Agency (the original idea was his).

Andrew Burnett – another social media exponent and expert traffic driver.

Jim Wolff – digital misfit (his words not mine) who joined Leith part way through the project.

There is no paying client behind EdTwinge. It’s been a fun and fruitful diversion from the day job for those of us lucky enough to be involved. And what we’ve learned about tag-team style collaboration, baton-passing Twitter account shifts, and fleet-of-foot digital seeding and amplification has been as valuable as the technical, under the bonnet of Twitter stuff.

Early days yet (3 and a half days into the Fringe at the time of writing), but there has already been a significant amount of positive commentary and the site appears to be performing well. A big thank you to our friends at Stripe for securing some really excellent profile for the project.

I’ll post a more in-depth analysis of results and learning in a couple of weeks but average time on site is currently running at over 4 minutes on the back of an average of 5.22 pages viewed per visit according to Google Analytics.

Follow us (EdTwinge) on Twitter for regular updates. And/or embed your own EdTwinge Top 10 widget, like this one that we prepared earlier…