Here’s a great article from the Globe and Mail focusing on the fans dedication to all things Twilight and how the internet plays into the Twilight Craze.

If you’re a Vancouverite who wouldn’t have known a few weeks ago who actor Robert Pattinson was if he came up and bit you in the neck, chances are that’s changed in the last while. Pattinson and his Twilight vampire saga co-stars (Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, et al.) have been in and around the city filming Twilight: Eclipse – the third instalment in the movie series – and bloodthirsty bloggers and celebrity gossip sites have been sucking it all up.

“Kellan Lutz on His Way Back to Vancouver, with Teddy Grahams!” gushed the Eclipse website this week, sparking a deluge of photos of Lutz, mid-sweaty gym workout sans shirt, or “Robsten” (yes, that’s Pattinson and Stewart) stepping out together on fan sites such as robertpattinsondaily.org and bellaandedward.com.

“I’m not sure I can even describe how much interest there is,” says Molly Goodson, editor of the San Francisco-based celebrity gossip site PopSugar. “I’ve been working on celebrity stuff for about four years and it’s by far the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s crazy.”

The Twilight films are based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels of the same name about the vampire Edward (Pattinson) and Bella (Stewart), the human teen who falls for him. The novels were bestsellers before they hit the big screen, but the films have turned the Twilight industry into an even larger phenomenon – fuelling a staggering interest in the stars.

“Any and every photo – it doesn’t matter how bad it is, it doesn’t matter how little you can see of the people, the fans want to see everything and they will look at every single photo all day long,” says Goodson.

To say the photos are good for driving traffic to the websites is an understatement.

“I think there’s probably more interest in this film than any other,” says Adam Nutburn, whose U.K.-based site Showbiz Spy posts daily updates on the stars in Vancouver. “It’s constant.”

Nutburn says most of his tips come from people working on-set. They, of course, request anonymity.

The production company has tried to keep filming sites under wraps, but when word of a location spreads (at a North Vancouver park, Port Moody’s Old City Hall), it can be mayhem, with hysterical fans showing up en masse. Some of those fans have travelled great distances – sometimes from other countries – to Vancouver in the hopes of seeing Pattinson, Stewart, Lutz (Emmett) or Lautner (Jacob) in the flesh. These pilgrimages are likely to continue until late next month, when shooting wraps up.

On Twitter, fans tweet about sightings. On Wednesday, when word emerged about a minor accident involving actor Jackson Rathbone (Jasper) during a fight-scene rehearsal, the news spread in minutes.

“We’ve never seen this level of interest by the public in something that’s filming in British Columbia,” says B.C. Film Commissioner Susan Croome, who adds that, frankly, it worries her. “I think there’s always a concern about safety when you have large numbers of people gathering in an area that is effectively a production zone. People are moving around a lot, there’s heavy equipment, there’s vehicles, there’s a lot of elements, and so safety is always an issue on a film set. And when you have people that are keen to see what’s going on and maybe not part of the process it’s always a concern.”

There’s safety – and then there’s showbiz snitches. Some of the tips Goodson receives have to do with the film’s content. And, like Showbiz Spy, Goodson says PopSugar is getting some of that information directly from the set.

“I think that they try really hard to keep that set as closely guarded as possible. They have the cast sworn to secrecy about everything and they try to have the set sworn to secrecy about everything, but there’s a lot of people working on that movie and there’s a lot of opportunities out there for them to leak information and that’s how it gets out.

“Luckily for the franchise … it doesn’t seem to lessen anybody’s interest in it. It’s not like they get the scoop and they’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t need to watch the movie now.’ They just want to watch it more.”