The Bureau

I've been trying to resist the urge to write about Twitter, but it's just too interesting not to. I've just got off the phone with a journalist from a Scottish press agency, who wanted to speak to me about my involvement with the Edinburgh Twestival.

When I got involved with planning the event, I had no idea it was going to be so popular. I naively thought we'd struggle to sell 40 tickets. In the end, it looks like we'll sell more than 200 (170 already gone) and potentially attract as many folk as we can fit in the building. This is great for charity: water (all proceeds from the 180+ Twestivals around the world go to charity), for my social life, and for my local Twitter ranking (25th in Edinburgh, last time I did a vanity search).

But what really interests me is the way local journalists have reacted to it. I contacted The List a few weeks ago to ask if they'd be interested in featuring EdTwestival. Turns out a lot of the staff are on Twitter already, so they 'got it' straight away and were very enthusiastic. What's more, inspired by us, they set up a Twitter account specifically for The List to stream news.

A couple of weeks later, and The Scotsman, The Herald, and the BBC have picked up on the buzz and are contacting us for stories. BBC Scotland are even coming to the event to live stream it. We've hardly had to do any press ourselves - Twitter has done all the work for us. By retweeting info about our sponsors, prizes and the bands we've booked, and our followers retweeting the news again, we generated interest organically, and in the process, we've convinced a number of journalists to sign up for Twitter to see what the fuss is about.

The journalist I spoke to today had just joined Twitter and said her conversation with me had 'opened her eyes' to the potential of it. At one point I started telling her about the Stephen Fry stuck-in-a-lift story, which, as a Twitter addict, I was laughing at as it happened last night. She'd caught the headlines, but hadn't absorbed the details. And then it hit me: here was I explaining the news to a journalist! The only reason that is possible is because of the tremendous meme-spreading, news-generating/promulgating possibilities of Twitter.

So, not only did we not need traditional news media in order to advertise the Edinburgh Twestival, in the process of generating our own hype, we became the news. Changing times indeed.