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Summer is festival time in Edinburgh, with thousands of visitors descending on the Scottish capital to see some of the best new talents in the arts and entertainment world. From grandiose theatres to tiny, dark pub back rooms hewn from volcanic rock in the medieval Old Town around the Royal Mile, every nook and cranny becomes a stage. Visit the top half of the Royal Mile, which links Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Palace, and you will find it full of performers showing off and advertising shows they hope will make their careers. And what of the shows themselves? Well, they could be almost anything, with genres spanning comedy, theatre, dance and cabaret. There is no one single Edinburgh Festival; instead there are 12 festivals spread throughout the year, with a flurry of activity in July and August. Details of them all can be found at www.edinburghfestivals.co.uk The largest and loudest is the Fringe (www.edfringe.com), in August. International talent rub shoulders with plucky newcomers hoping to make their name with a decent run. The Fringe is based around a hub in George Square, which features seven theatres as well as bars and stalls serving street food. Many other venues can be found on the other side of the city close to the Royal Mile.

"BREAKFAST is nasty, the rooms are nasty." So complained a reviewer of an Oregon guesthouse earlier this year. There is nothing unusual in that: all hotels must deal with the odd disgruntled guest. This critique, though, appeared on TripAdvisor, a travel-review website. When the correspondent went on to document drunken housekeepers and licentious receptionists, the owners sued him. It was more than a point of pride. What customers say on TripAdvisor can make or break hotels. Around 260m people visit the site each month to read some of the 125m reviews. The firm makes money by displaying prices from online travel-agents (OTAs) alongside its reviews, and then charging those agents each time a customer clicks through. It is such a good example of a network effect that it is the subject of a Harvard Business School (HBS) case study. The more users post reviews, the more useful the site is to those about to book a holiday. This makes it more important to hotels and travel agents, who offer better deals. This results in more traffic-and more reviews-closing the virtuous circle. Last year TripAdvisor reported revenue of $944.7m. Because users post reviews free of charge, in 2012, Jeffrey Bussgang, an HBS lecturer, calculated that its gross margin was an astounding 98%. For these reasons, some think TripAdvisor may be able to take on the "big two" OTAs, Expedia (from which TripAdvisor was spun off in 2011) and Priceline, which on August 6th bought up to 10% of Ctrip, a large travel website in China. These firms sell flights and hotel rooms directly, rather than pass booking requests on to others, as TripAdvisor does. But, says Blake Harper of Wunderlich Securities, a stockbroker, the two ways of doing business are converging.