Lanyrd Gets Even Better – But Can It Provide The Main Event Web Site?

 

Updates to Lanyrd

Back in May 2012 I asked Why Would You Not Use #Lanyrd For Your Event? On 23 July the Lanyrd blog announced new developments to the Lanyrd social event directory service which means the service is getting even better:

We’re now inviting event organisers to claim their event listings on Lanyrd. Claiming an event is free and claimed events gain access to useful additional features including event descriptions, advanced schedule editing and the ability to embed schedule and speaker information on another website.

Once you have claimed an event you will be able to:

• Add a description of events. As illustrated, the Lanyrd entry for the IWMW 2012 event has been updated to include brief details of the event together with hypertext links to related resources.
• Display of grid view of events with multiple sessions, including parallel sessions, as we have done for the timetable for the IWMW 2012 event.
• Provide access control for editors of the content.
• Embed ticket sales using Eventbrite.
• Syndicate content hosted in Lanyrd to other web sites. An example of such syndication can be seen on the page listing the speakers at the IWMW 2012 event.

When I asked Why Would You Not Use #Lanyrd For Your Event? I was conscious that one potential barrier to use of the service was the Wikipedia-style approach the service had taken to creating content, which meant that any registered user could update the content. As illustrated below once an event has been claimed you can now restrict edits to approved users.

I have now claimed over 20 events which I set up on Lanyrd and have changed access permissions so that only a number of colleagues at UKOLN can change the content for event which have already taken place although, as shown below, speakers still have the rights to update session information in case there were changes to the sessions which I was unaware of.

Reflections on Lanyrd

Back in May 2012 when I asked Why Would You Not Use #Lanyrd For Your Event? I suggested that creating Lanyrd entries for previous events could be useful for several reasons including:

• Providing a better understanding of the speakers and facilitators who have contributed to the event over the years.
• Helping to raise the profile of the speakers and facilitators.
• Enhancing participants’ memories of the events.

by:

• Decoupling the content from the host Web site (which provides primarily a HTML view of the content).
• Avoiding the need for local development.

In light of the recent developments I am now wondering whether Lanyrd could be used to provide the prime entry point for new events. In August 2010 I asked Should Event Web Sites Be The First To Be Outsourced? This post reflected on the decision to host the FAM10 (Federated Access Management) event web site using Google Sites. Nicole Harris, the event organiser, had decided to outsource the IT infrastructure for the event: ”we will do all the event management in-house … using Google for booking forms, document management, presentation publication and event information“.

The blog post generated interesting discussions. In response to concerns that use of such third party services meant a loss of control of branding and visual identity for an event web site Martin Hawksey commented that:

Google sites do allow you to create your own custom template so it is easy to add logos change colours. The biggest cost in this area is probably staff time and whilst you might be saving money on hosting, you loose it in time required to set the site up.

Chris Gutteridge highlighted another concern:

Conference websites are part of the academic record and it is very important to maintain at least some of the content. Most conference webmasters don’t even shift the front page to be past-tense once it’s over but part of the design should be how it’s left long term.

Chris is right to raise this concern. Back in 2005 I spoke at the Accessible Design in the Digital World conference. But if I visit the ADDW05 web site I now get a parking domain, as illustrated.

I suspect there will be many conference web sites which are now difficult to find. For example looking at the IW3C2′s list of the international WWW conferences although the web site for the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web still exists, the web site for The Second International WWW Conference is only available via the Internet Archive whilst The Third International WWW Conference no longer appears to exist.

Although there are clearly risks in reliance on third party services for providing web sites it also needs to be recognised that there are also risks in attempting to simply use in-house services.

Many high profile conferences will wish to have their own domain name, so there will be a need to manage ownership of the domain for an extended period – as Chris Gutteridge suggested ten years might be regarded as the minimum period for a registering a conference domain.

But in addition to the management of an event’s domain, there is also the need to consider the risks associated with failing to exploit developments which may not be available if only in-house resources are used.

A compromise approach would be to continue to host content locally but to make use of services, such as Lanyrd to provide value-added functionality which may not be appropriate to provide in-house. This has been the approach taken to support recent IWMW events.

However such considerations do not necessarily mean that an external service can never be used to deliver an event web site. The FAM10 web site continues to be available on Google Site. In this case the issues related to the long-term sustainability of the event web site would be (a) is the service likely to be sustainable; (b) is provider of the service likely to change the terms and conditions; (c) can the content be easily exported; (d) is there a need for the content to be accessible and (e) can the costs in migrating the content be justified?

We can reasonably expect Google to continue and might reasonably expect any changes to the availability and terms and conditions for Google Sites to be notified to users of the service, as they have done for the iGoogle and Google Video services. But what of Lanyrd?

From the Lanyrd entry on Crunchbase we learn that Lanryd was launched on 31 August 2010 and received $1.4M funding. There appear to be only two people listed as being involved with the company: the co-founders Simon Willison and Natalie Downe (both of whom, incidentally, are from the UK and Natalie obtained her degree in Computer Science here at the University of Bath).

Using Lanyrd you can find out about other events speakers have spoken at and their forthcoming events.

Although I am a fan of the service, in light of the apparent lack of additional funding and uncertainty of the service’s business model I do not feel that Lanyrd can currently be used to provide the master source of content for a large-scale event, especially if access to the content for several years after the event is needed.

However I do feel that Lanyrd does have a valuable role to play in providing additional access to the content for an event as well as providing a social dimension to an event though use of the Twitter IDs for speakers and participants at events listed on Lanyrd, as illustrated in the accompanying image.

This social dimension is the Lanyrd’s key feature and this is the reason why I felt useful to create Lanyrd entries for previous IWMW events. But will Lanyrd not only continue to develop additional features which can support the needs of event organisers and participants and, perhaps more importantly, be able to demonstrate that the service will continue to be available for a period of 5 to 10 years?

I’d be interested in others’ views on the role which people feel Lanyrd can play in supporting events.

---

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Further Thoughts on Lanyrd

Graham Attwell is a fan of Lanyard. On the Wales Wide Web he recently informed his readers that “Last night I spent a hour or so playing with new social software startup, Lanyrd. And I love it.” Graham likes it because it is so easy to use and it makes his work easier. Graham also went on to add that “The site is very open. Anyone is free to add and edit on the wikipedia shared knowledge principle.“

Such freedom is an interesting aspect to the service, which I only started to appreciate after I noticed hat Martin Hawksey had added a link to a video of one of the plenary talks at the IWMW 2010 event. Hmm, anyone can create an event, add themselves as a speaker and upload slides. Sounds like this could be open to misuse – but we have no evidence that this will happen.

In any case the main interface which a registered user sees are the events which their Twitter folders are attending or have an interest in. The accompanying image, for example, shows how information on Lanyrd about the forthcoming Online Information 2010 conference includes details of seven people I follow on Twitter are speakers at the conference. And since there is some degree of trust when you choose to follow someone, I am not too concerned about misleading information being published – and the FAQ states that “We plan to offer pro accounts for conferences in the future, and one of the features will be the ability to lock a conference page so only specific people can edit it.”

The Lanyrd page for the IWMW 2010 event is illustrated. As can be seen information about 29 speakers is available and access is available to 9 videos and slideshows of the plenary speakers. But if adding content to Lanyrd is easy, what is the etiquette of doing this?

We can observe how early adopters are creating conference entries on Lanyrd and adding details about public information such as dates, venues and information of speakers.

Such early adopters may be speakers themselves but as awareness of the service grows and how it can provide viral marketing for events (as potential attendees notice that people they follow on Twitter are speaking at events and may chose to register for such event ) we might expect event organisers to be pro-active in creating event entries on the service.

But what about including intellectual content, such as links to speakers’ slides, videos of talks, etc.? What are the associated rights issues if a page contains not only links to resources but also embedded slide shows and video clips, as is the case for the Lanyrd page for Paul Boag’s talk on “No money? No matter – Improve your website with next to no cash” which he gave at IWMW 2010?

Established practices means that no permission needs to be sought in order to link to a public Web page. And the embedding of rich content? Well since these resources have been uploaded to slide and video sharing services such as Slideshare and Vimeo there is surely an implied consent that the embed capabilities of these services can be used?

Which means that a failure of event organisers to be pro-active in creating a Lanyrd page for an event could result in entries being created which fail to include desired branding and acknowledgements and inconsistencies in the coverage of specific sessions. But perhaps that is a feature of the bottom-up approach to content creation which easy-to-use services in now facilitating? Such considerations need to be considered by speakers as well as event organisers – there are currently 14 speakers listed on the Lanyrd entry for the Online Information 2010 conference. Are the many other speakers listed on the conference programme missing out on exposure and possible networking and marketing opportunities? And will those who participate in elearning conferences have different approaches to those from the library sector? I’ll be interested to see how the Lanyrd page for the Online Educa conference develops.

---

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Developments to the Lanyrd Service

The Lanyrd service was launched on 31 August and, as described on the Zeldman.com blog: “Lanyrd uses Twitter to tell you which conferences, workshops and such your friends are attending or speaking at. You can add and track events, and soon you’ll be able to export your events as iCal or into your Google calendar (the site is powered by microformats).“. The post went on to add that “Soon, too, you’ll be able to add sessions, slides, and videos“.

Yesterday there was the confirmation of  Slides, video, audio, sketchnotes… coverage on Lanyrd. This announcement was accompanied by a reference of the importance which the service places on metadata: “It’s the perfect past-time for metadata addicts like us! … 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.“

In order to explore how this metadata is used I created the following search queries:

• Conferences in Sheffield containing the string “UKOLN”: see results
• Conferences about “Web standards” containing the string “web”: see results
• Conferences about HTML5 containing the string “standards” held in 2010: see results
• Conferences in London containing the string “metadata”: see results

The final example has a link to a two-day event on “Maximising the Effectiveness of Your Online Resources” which I co-facilitated. At that event myself and George Munroe described various approaches which can be used to maximise awareness of and use of digital resources. Such approaches included various Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, use of metadata and exploitation of the Social Web services.

Such approaches can apply to exploitation of services such as Lanyrd (and related popular Social Web services such as YouTube, Slideshare, etc).  These services are often very popular, with links to the services helping to enhance its Google ranking – and similarly links from such services can enhance traffic to institutional services.  So adding your metadata and appropriate links can be a way of raising the visibility of your resources – and arguably could be more cost effective than adding such metadata only to in-house services (it should be noted that such services are often very easy to use).

I’ve registered for an account on this service, in part to monitor how this service develops and to claim my preferred username on the service – and in addition because I feel that use of such services can be beneficial and worth a little amount of time in registering and uploading a small number of items. I will also be interested to see if Lanyrd develops so that it could be used as a mainstream event Web site. As I asked recently Should Event Web Sites Be The First To Be Outsourced?. And, if so, what role could Lanyrd play?