Introducing Audio Podcasts and Live Reading

by Eric March on February 24, 2008 at 4:45 pm

You may have noticed a couple of new features on the site. Courtesy of a cool new service for bloggers, we have subscribed to the Odiogo podcast service, which uses a surprisingly good text-to-speech engine to automatically convert blog entries into audio podcasts and the ability to read each blog entry aloud from within each article. At the top of this and every article you will see a Listen Now button. Clicking on this will bring up the player (Adobe Flash plugin required) and allow you to have the blog entry read aloud to you in a very good facsimile of human speech, with familiar cadence, pitch changes and pauses in the right places. It isn’t absolutely perfect but it’s very close indeed.

The second and more interesting feature is the ability to subscribe to the blog via an audio podcast that you can have delivered directly to your iTunes and copied to your iPod so you can listen on the go! You will notice an Odiogo Podcast button on the right. Clicking on this will bring you to a menu with a plethora of options, allowing you to subscribe to our podcast with iTunes or Juice, with web-readers such as My Yahoo, NetVibes, Google, My MSN, NewsGator, or My AOL, or share with friends on Facebook, Delicious, Digg, or Technorati. You can also download individual article podcasts as MP3 files to listen on any player, anytime, anywhere.

Give it a try and tell us what you think! We would be interested in hearing your opinions on these new features.

UPDATE: There are currently a few issues with Odiogo, primairly that it will not encode or read anything beyond an article break (wherever you see a “Continue reading…” link), and it currently starts playing the podcast article every time you click on, and close, a thumbnail image. We are in communication with the folks at Odiogo to find a solution and will hopefully be able to fix these issues soon.

UPDATE 2: The article break problem has been solved, so you will now receive full articles in your podcasts (and RSS feeds, too!). The folks at Red Herring are currently looking into the thumbnail problems. We will keep you apprised of the progress on this issue.

If you enjoyed this story, join the growing number of subscribers to our RSS Feed for live updates!