Lanyrd now has 2,500 videos and 3,000 slide decks from events around the world

[simonw]

http://lanyrd.com/blog/2011/thumbnails/

[simonw]

We've been collecting coverage of events since late last year, but our big new feature is that we've started using thumbnails (generated from SlideShare, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, WordPress.tv, Prezi, Ustream, LiveStream and now Speaker Deck) to highlight that content around the site.

So for example, our NodeConf page now has a coverage highlights widget:

http://lanyrd.com/2011/nodeconf/

And our topic pages have a slider for exploring related slides and video. Some examples:

http://lanyrd.com/topics/scala/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/erlang/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/django/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/php/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/user-experience/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/mobile/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/javascript/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/nodejs/

We're also using the new slider widget on our speaker profile pages:

http://lanyrd.com/profile/jeresig/

http://lanyrd.com/profile/paulg/

And on our series pages:

http://lanyrd.com/series/startup-school/

http://lanyrd.com/series/fowa/

Under the hood we're using a combination of Embedly, Celery and our own custom scraping code.

[simonw → simonw]

To clarify, our video data is all crowdsourced - our community paste in URLs to the videos/slides. We then fetch the URL they give us and parse it to find the embed codes (mostly we just rely on Embedly for this, but we have our own fallback code as well).

[maxogden]

cool. I noticed you didn't have an API for videos so made one for you: http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/lanyrd_videos/

[mmahemoff → maxogden]

There's a Lanyrd API group: http://groups.google.com/group/lanyrd-api/

But Simon mentioned there that work an API has been put on hold right now to work on other features. I've been hoping for an API for exactly this kind of app (a video mashup).

[bryme → maxogden]

thanks gee

[marknutter]

I've never understood the utility of posting slide decks. Without the speaker, the vast majority of them are close to worthless.

[tednaleid → marknutter]

I think there are a few classes of presentations where good slides can still convey 80% of the content of the presentation.

They tend to be meaty technical ones, which is the kind of thing lanyrd would likely be heavy on with all of the tech events they have.

Presentations with lots of live coding are likely not worthwhile.

[simonw → marknutter]

Slide decks posted after an event can be extremely valuable for the people who were actually there in the room as a memory aid - I often say "you can review this code sample in the slides later" when I'm speaking for example.

I find I can often get a lot of information out of reading slides, even decks that clearly weren't designed tomb viewed without a speak. It helps to have a good understanding of the subject matter though.

Finally, if a video of a talk is already available it can be useful to flick through the slides first before committing to the 30 or so minutes it take tomwatch the video, to confirm that the material is likely to be interesting.