I stumbled upon a nice source of PHP information today (I’ve apparently been hiding under a rock) and think other PHP geeks will be interested. The audio version of the Zend Conference Talks are online, meaning, you may freely listen to them at your leisure. So go there now, download the talk slides, then press play and enjoy. Kudos to Zend for making these 2007 talks available! Their 2008 conference is coming up so hopefully this means more online talks here soon.
And now a mild rant. I’m bias against all conferences because they are expensive and geared towards small groups. People spend time writing talks for hundreds instead of, for example, writing documentation for millions. If you ever see me holding a sign that reads “We want docs, not talks!” outside of conferences, well, you now know why. ;) And slides by themselves are no substitute but each to their own…
Now back to the topic of this blog post. Go check out those talks and have a listen and who knows, maybe one day other conferences will follow Zend’s wonderful lead. Or maybe some already do and I’m just not aware. Also I wonder if there is software out there that can take the slides, some audio, and allow humans to easily sync the two for other humans…
The preperation I’ve put into getting ready for a conference, a magazine article, or other limited audiance work has laid the ground work for some of the work I’ve been able to do on the docs (or other things that I’ve managed to make publically available).
At the same time I don’t think this is an either or situation. Where if these conferences weren’t happening these speakers would turn around and re-direct their efforts towards documentation.
I think the immediacy and intimacy of a conference provides things that docs never can, and at the same time provides those speakers with an opportunity to meet with each other, share ideas, communicate and argue, all on someone else tab.
We at phplondon have, and are continuing to, release the talks from our recent conference held at the end of February. There will be another one up there at the end of this week, so download and enjoy at your leisure. :)
http://www.phpconference.co.uk
In terms of software, well you could use Flash or Ming and cue the slides to timed points in sound files I think. But again, it takes time to do this. As Paul R states above, you cannot get away from the immediacy you achieve being at the conference itself. If you’re not there, you should be willing to accept the small inconvenience of working out which slide you need to be on when listening to the audio track IMHO.
Cheers.
I’ve seen the zend sessions podcasts before but hadn’t noticed the slides were also available. In my defence, one of the two sessions I had looked at doesn’t have slides available. I’m definitely going to take another look now I can follow along with the slides.
On the topic of software to sync audio to slides check out slideshare.net
I gave a short presentation at the BarcampScotland event in February (which means it’s already outdated) and tested the technology. They call it slidecasting. It’s a time consuming process but very easy.
I understand where you’re coming from and no doubt some good things happen at conferences but to see talks about topics that remain undocumented is frustrating, especially when people seemingly offer slides as a substitute.
Cool, I notice two talks there now. Maybe once you get up to four or five you will create a page that lists these as I’m afraid otherwise they’ll become lost. And Jonathan mentioned slideshare and after doing a test I must say it’s nice with an intuitive interface. I’d be willing to do the work of syncing if conferences allowed it.
Thanks you, I just now did a test syncing a slidecast and find it intuitive and easy. It appears the audio must remain offsite (at least, while creating the slidecast it requires an URL and not a file upload) but it’s fairly simple and slick to create.
So I envision a site that slidecasts and lists all available PHP talks but fear conferences would not go for it… which is understandable but it’d be nice. I’d do the work of syncing (and am sure others would too) but, well, we’ll see what happens.
Thank you for this, not yet taken the Zend Certification, though have wrote a Zend Certification Wiki (http://zend.codephp.co.uk) as revision a year back.
A link related to this post, which I found recently and watched. Though it is mainly basics, for newer coders, yet very informative:
http://cs75.tv/2009/fall/
Keep Blogging.
Nice links. I’ve attempted to convince a few non-programmer friends to follow the http://cs50.tv/ course but I haven’t seen cs75 yet, I imagine it’s good (excellent professor). I’ll evaluate it next week.
The podcasts from the Dutch PHP Conferences (2009 and 2010) are all avaialble from techPortal – see http://techportal.ibuildings.com/dpc-radio/
Ah, nice. I attempted to sync slides with audio a few times [long ago] but found it to be a lot of work, and once the slides didn’t lineup. And of course, not sure how legal it is. I used slideshare to do “slidecasting”. May try it again as I think it’s useful. Maybe ibuildings would be interested in such a venture.