Podcasting has been of mind lately, as I pondered an accompanying podcast to The Hot Iron blog. A monthly or semi-monthly podcast featuring highlights of recent posts and perhaps some unique content was my running thought.

Then along comes a new, free service to automatically convert the words of blog posts to an audio file. Odiogo takes my RSS feed and creates an MP3 file with a digitized voice reading the text of each blog post. About a week after signing up for the service, I am in the program, and MP3s of the last ten posts are now available – you can follow this link to Odiogo or subscribe to their feed.

How does it sound? You can tell it is a digitized voice, but it is very clear and it speaks "difficult" words well, like Maddaloni. I put my last name, which people have been mispronouncing all my life, into my last post to see how it sounds, and it was better than I have heard from many people. The service is free to bloggers, and there is an ad program available to blogs with high traffic, sounding similar to Feedburner’s ad program.

Give it a listen and I am eager to hear your feedback.

Comments

Careful, first the robots are reading our blog posts to people and next thing you know they’ve taken over the world :) I was actually thinking the other day about how podcasting conveys more personality than blogging does (watching, of all things, AskANinja.com). As you say, something to think about down the road.

Comment by Peter M.
on 02/01/07 at 01:01 PM
 

I don’t know - those cavemen in the GEICO ads may be making a comeback…!  A podcast has more personality, something that is hard to convey with the written word - there are those that do it well, and others that are striving to do so.

Comment by Mike Maddaloni
on 02/01/07 at 01:11 PM
 

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