Simon Willison’s Weblog

Which is a better site to archive conferences- Conferize or Lanyrd?

20th July 2012

My answer to Which is a better site to archive conferences- Conferize or Lanyrd? on Quora

We’re very proud of our tools for archiving information from conferences—we support attaching slides, videos, audio clips and other links directly to pages about sessions for conferences. These are then aggregated for the entire conference and are also linked to from our profile pages for individual speakers. If the session has topics attached to it, we also show thumbnails of the coverage elsewhere on the site.

Here’s a good example: The O’Reilly OSCON conference is taking place this week in Portland. We’re currently listing 39 slide decks and 11 videos from the conference. Those items (we call them ’coverage’) are displayed in a bunch of different places:

• As embedded media (YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo, Speakerdeck, blip.tv and a number of other services are supported) on the session pages themselves—here’s one with both a video and a slide deck: http://lanyrd.com/2012/oscon/swqhc/
  
• As a thumbnail teaser on the OSCON event page: http://lanyrd.com/2012/oscon/#co...
• In a thumbnail slider at the top of the speaker profile page for the speakers, e.g. http://lanyrd.com/profile/timore...
• In our searchable index of all slide decks at OSCON: http://lanyrd.com/2012/oscon/sli...
• As thumbnails on our global topic pages—recent presentations about Perl are linked at the top of http://lanyrd.com/topics/perl/ for example
• And finally, in our searchable index of slides or video from thousands of other events around the world: http://lanyrd.com/slides/ and http://lanyrd.com/video/

In total, our community has collected over 7,400 slide decks and 7,300 videos from events around the world. Here are a few more examples of events with extensive archived coverage:

• PyCon US 2012 (94 videos, 34 slide decks) http://lanyrd.com/2012/pycon/
• BarCamp London 8 (6 videos, 28 slide decks, 6 write-ups, 28 photos) http://lanyrd.com/2010/barcamp-l...
• Ignite London 6 (13 videos) http://lanyrd.com/2012/igniteldn6/

There are a couple of limitations to remember: firstly, we don’t host the video/slides/etc ourselves—instead, we encourage people to upload them to existing services such as Slideshare, Speakerdeck.com, YouTube, Vimeo etc and then link to those services from our session pages. If the content is embeddable we’ll embed it in the page and create our own thumbnail from it as well.

Secondly, we don’t yet do anything interesting with photos from events. We’ll be doing more in this area in the future (I’d love to hear what kind of thing you’re looking for here) but for the moment one potential workaround would be to compile photos from the event in to a slideshare presentation and link to that. Alternatively you could always link from Lanyrd to a gallery on Flickr, Google+ or similar.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this—you can reach me (and the rest of the Lanyrd team) at support-at-lanyrd-dot-com