Cisco has put more effort this year into their web presence for Networkers. There are four main websites for Cisco Live this year.
First up is the main, public web site for Cisco Live.
This is a marketing site, but it is well done. It has integrated video done efficiently in flash, a video blog through YouTube, and a preferences tool for tracking things you are interested in. If you're at Networkers this week you've probably already been through this site.
It was also nice to see Cisco get into Twitter micro blogging this year.
I've been playing with Twitter a little while and like the microblogging concept for staying in contact in friends in a non real-time fashion. It's like delayed multicast.
Once registered, you get access to the "My Account" section. This has links to the next couple sections I'm going to discuss, but also allows you to sign up for courses and a free certification exam.
The scheduler is the same as last year. It's actually a good system to pick the classes you are interested in and then have the "Auto Scheduler" fit all the courses in.
One of the Web 2.0 sites for this year is "Cisco Live Connect".
Live Connect allows you to setup a profile, link to your blog, sync with LinkedIn, setup interests, and interact with peers.
It also has a "Map View" which, I think, shows people at Networkers who are closest to your interests. Then you can interact with them.
Looks like Troy Rouillard is closest to my interest.
This is a good way to find friends at a conference with 10,000 people walking around - other than just saying "hi" to someone of course.
;-)
Finally is this year's trip into virtual reality with "Cisco Live Virtual". This is a VR site done in flash which is cool in thought and a tad annoying in practice.
You move around the virtual conference to access content, including PDFs of all the sessions. Cisco is not supplying paper handouts this year as part of its green initiative, so you can get the slides off this site.
Overall, I think this is a neat future concept. VR is getting more mainstream with Second Life and other environments and I think Cisco is on the right track, but it's definitely a 1.0 release. I'm still waiting for a site where I can just download the PDFs from a simple list on a webpage.
Once you find the PDFs you're interested in you can add them to your "Event Bag" for downloading later.
