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Getting An Earful From Your Blog Posts…

A fellow blogger from the Saint Louis Bloggers Guild turned me onto a very cool plugin. It’s actually part of a service provided by Odiogo.com. It takes your blog posts and turn them into podcasts, which are audio versions that can be played through an media player or directly on your computer.

Odiogo logo

But the service is actually more than that. They provide plugins for various platforms (including WordPress) that can be integrated right into the posts. For example, at the beginning of this post on my site, there should be a small badge that says ‘listen now’. Clicking that will open a small window and begin playing this post right here.

The service also creates an RSS feed so people can subscribe to the audio versions of your blog. This service comes at a really great time as someone close to me is struggling with some vision issues and looking at the computer screen for more than a couple minutes causes problems. With this, she can at least listen to my blog posts.

And the voice reading the posts is pretty good. He does mess up. Really, all of them will. But he is very natural-sounding as the voices go. Also, the service (at this time) is free, which makes it a no-brainer.

Give it a listen and consider expanding your audience to people who access their content a different way.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Randomness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Getting An Earful From Your Blog Posts…”

  1. Wendy Says:
    April 20th, 2009 at 11:22 pm

    I have to agree with Becca – it’s fun listening to your posts! Go Patrick :)

  2. the replicant Says:
    April 20th, 2009 at 11:41 pm

    I like this idea. I may just give it a try myself.

  3. Jeffro Says:
    April 21st, 2009 at 12:48 am

    Gave your blog post a listen. It was interesting HEARING what your post sounds like rather than reading it. It was like two different posts. This may be a good method of figuring out how to properly write a post so that it looks good for readers while also sounding natural for the human hear. Not too bad of a voice either.

  4. BeccA's Buzz Says:
    April 22nd, 2009 at 12:40 am

    Yes, it’s tricky with the various punctuation causing pauses and inflections. Very cool!!! The best idea I’ve heard in a long time! I hope it stays free and you keep it on even if the vision issues get better. :)

    BeccA’s Buzz´s last blog post…Time to party!

  5. Bob Sloan Says:
    April 22nd, 2009 at 9:54 am

    Its actully very good sounding :) Not much “robot” here. It should be absolutely perfect for my father. It might be possible to get him more interested in blogging now :)