Simon Willison’s Weblog

Events (leisure): How do you find out about Conferences happening in various places in the world?

My answer to Events (leisure): How do you find out about Conferences happening in various places in the world? on Quora

Our site http://lanyrd.com/ is a crowd-sourced directory of conferences and other professional events across a large range of topics from all around the world. We have particularly good coverage of technology and social media events (perhaps unsurprisingly, since that’s where the early adopters are) but we’re continuing to grow in to other areas.

If you sign in to the site using your Twitter account we’ll show you events your Twitter contacts are attending or speaking at. You can also opt to track curated “guides” to categories of events made by members of our community, for example this guide to Education and eLearning events: http://lanyrd.com/guides/educati...

You can sign up for low frequency emails from us highlighting new events your contacts are attending. We also have RSS and iCal feeds for most pages on the site, for example this page listing Startup conferences in Europe: http://lanyrd.com/topics/startup...

In addition to conference listings and event discovery we also collect slides, notes and video from events—here’s a recent example: http://lanyrd.com/2012/codemash/

Another useful site for discovering events is http://plancast.com/ (which covers more than just conferences).