Conference Audio Highlights

I manage to attend a decent number of conferences each year (despite my employers lack of interest) but while the UK ones are pretty cheap and amazingly good at securing top notch speakers (UKUUG is brilliant at this) there are a lot of conferences I don’t get to experience beyond the odd blog post and mailing list summary due to geographical location or cost (OSCON wins on both counts!)

In a recent post by Jon Udell he pointed to some clips hosted by IT Conversations, after a quick rummage around their site I now have plenty to keep me busy on those long train commutes. The site has streaming and downloadable versions of a number of technical talks, keynotes and interviews. I’ve listened to a couple of them already and have to say I’m impressed at the quality of the recordings. If you want to catch up with some of the better speakers in the IT industry this site may be THE best way to do it.

One other aspect of the site that warrants mentioning is the ‘clipping service’, with nothing more than the clip ID (easy to get) and a start and end time you can create URL's that point to the exact section you want and listen with a single click. Here is an example from Paul Grahams talk at OSCON.