Slides, video, audio, sketchnotes... coverage on Lanyrd

Lanyrd already finds conferences for you to attend based on who you follow on Twitter. With conference coverage, we can now help you get more out of the events you've been to and catch up on events you missed.

The web is scattered with the remnants of conferences past. Videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Justin.tv and blip.tv, slides on SlideShare and Scribd, thousands of blog entries and even sketchnotes on Flickr. Our new coverage feature lets you collect together all of that stuff and attach it to conferences, sessions, speakers and topics. It's the perfect past-time for metadata addicts like us!

How it works

Here's how to use coverage. Find a link that's relevant to your favourite event out there on the big wide web — a write-up, a podcast, or maybe your own slides on SlideShare. Head over to the relevant Lanyrd session page (or add a new session), paste the link in to the box, check the title and content type then in the spin of a whisker it'll be added to the site.

If you link to a video from one of the video sites mentioned earlier we'll try to display an embedded version — likewise for slides from SlideShare and Scribd. If you link to an MP3 recording of a session we'll even include a snazzy player widget.

Don't forget the metadata!

Make sure to add topics and speakers to the sessions. Coverage is deeply integrated with Lanyrd, and shows up in all sorts of places when combined with the right metadata. Here are some neat examples:

• Videos from Startup School
• Everything from Fronteers 2010
• Audio from Web Directions South
• Sketch notes about design
• Slides by Simon Collison

You can use our search engine to create even more elaborate combinations. Slides about Django presented during 2009 in Prague, perhaps?

Saving your favourites

We've also introduced a way of saving your favourite pieces of coverage. Click the yellow star to save something to your favourites, and tell the speaker (and the world) how much you appreciate their hard work. Favourites are currently used in a few places for ordering coverage on a page, and in the future will form part of a more extensive recommendation system.

Or just explore

The easiest way to explore is to dive in to our new coverage center, or dip your toe in our content collections of video, slides or audio. Thank you very much to our beta testers who have been helping populate the initial collection (and iron out the kinks) over the past few days. And thanks to embed.ly for providing our embed codes.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!