Another entry in online community for speakers and audiences: joind.in | Social Signal

A quick note for speakers, event organizers and - most of all - folks who attend presentations: SpeakerRate, the presentation-reviewing site I mentioned a week or two ago, isn't the only game in town.

The folks at joind.in dropped me a line to let me know about their site. Here's how they describe it:

It's a similar type of site, but we're more about focusing on the community around the conferences and less about just the ratings.

The site includes spots for feedback on both talks and events including a rating system. There's already been several of the key PHP conferences that have used it as an alternative to providing paper forms or blanket emails asking for opinions. All feedback gives a free-form text field to let the attendee express what they want.

We also have an API (http://joind.in/api for more info) that can be used for pulling out information like talk comments, a speaker's talk list and, for authorized users, input talk and event information. If you'd like more information on this, let me know - I can give you more specifics.

Attendees are also able to say that they're attending/were at the conference. This is a budding part of our social focus with future plans on making connections between these people and proviidng facilities to let them work out things like sharing cabs to the airport or even setting up "subevents" of their own that anyone could attend.

We also have a programmer working on an addition to our speaker information that would allow our site (via the API) to act as a centralized repository for speaker bio information for any conference that might want to pull it.

That API could prove to be a key advantage. One other interesting difference: unlike SpeakerRate, joined.in doesn't seem to let you create an entry for an event that has already happened.

I'll look forward to doing a more in-depth comparison down the road. In the meantime, if you've been giving (or attending) presentations, take either or both of these sites for a spin - I'd love to know what you think.