One of the things that is very time consuming is reading blogs. Even though I subscribe through Blogarithm's service, which e-mails me the list of blogs that have been updated, I don't read all of them since I'm so busy working on PhD research and other stuff. However, I listen to my iPod mini all the time in between transit from school and home. So, wouldn't it be great to translate all the blog feeds that I read into MP3 and then subscribe them in iTunes? Well, this is what Talkr is all about, you've heard of Flickr for photos, frappr for mapping photos onto location. It seem the next thing is adding the r at the end of a word, even Motorola is doing it with their cell phones like Razr, Krzr, and now I've heard of the Lazr. What's with the 'r' phenomenon? First, we had the 'e' as in e-services, e-government, e-mail, etc., then the 'i' that Apple started with iPod, iTunes, iMovie, iRaq, iRan (ok you have to see the YouTube video on this, to understand what I'm talking about). It looks like we're not continuing the vowels, but now the consonants.
Anyways, back to what I wanted to say. I was just reading the KMDI newsletter which I subscribe to (and manage to find some interesting and fascinating stuff), and came across this Talkr service which allows you to translate text from blog feeds into MP3 audio. I thought that's great! That's what I need. So naturally, I decided to just try this out with my own blog feed. Anticipating, I'll be able to hear my own blog posts, I heard nothing, it didn't seem to work. So, I decided to try it out with Talkr's own blog feed. You can hear it here. But as you can hear, it still sounds not quite good, at least not as good as a regular podcast, because they're using some computer-generated voice to talk based on the translation of text.
I don't think I could hear that on my iPod, there's something if a person doesn't sound that good on a podcast, that really bothers me when I listen.
Still an interesting service though.
On Technorati: Talkr, voice, text, audioblog
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