Podcasts, Conferences, and Videos

A few days ago I wrote about my new projects collecting data about conferences and podcasts. Since then I made some progress, but I need to make some further plans.

Just thinking aloud.

The problem is big, though it does not seem to be very sophisticated.

I've merged the site listing the podcasts and the conferences and even started to add videos.

Currently there are 57 videos which is nothing compare dot the 5,552 I can see on the PyVideo site. Even the Perl TV site has 518 videos. So clearly I need to add a lot more videos before this becomes interesting.

Though I already received some improvements, the site still looks quite bad and at least the video listing is not very useful.

The original plan was to collect the information to make it easier to decide if a potential guest for the CMOS interviews has been on lot of other podcasts and if she has made any conference appearances.

It seemed that the same database, if displayed properly can be useful to others as well.

Goals

Anyway, let's see what are the goals of this project:

  • Make it easy for people to find speaking opportunities.
  • Make it easy for people to find events where they can meet fellow developers.
  • Make it easy to find content that is relevant for programmers (and testers and designers and ...).

Right now the site provides information about conferences and not on meetings. The difference is, I guess, that a conference is usually one or more days long, while a meeting is only a few hours long. A meeting is usually only attractive to people who live near-by (to some value of "near-by"), but a conference, especially if it is several days long, can be relevant for more people who need traveling. Meetup is an excellent platform to organize and find meetings. Less so for conferences that need a lot more communication, and a lot more organization. (e.g. schedule) It seems most conferences, or conference series have their own conference management software. Probably built in-house.

Next steps

I've started to write this post because I was wondering where should I invest more energy in the site, but then it turned into a different article. Anyway, the options are:

  • Add more videos. (simple, but time consuming)
  • Add tags to videos to make it easier to find them? (even more time consuming)
  • Add more podcast episodes. (Episodes can be added using some script. People need to be added manually.)
  • Fix/Add search capability to the site. Separate search for videos, events, podcasts, people.
  • Improve the UI. Make the site look more attractive. (Or wait for someone who can actually make attractive sites?)