Audio Blog Posts

Did you notice the little button at the top of each post: 'listen now'? Go ahead, give it a click. This button comes to you courtesy of Odiogo. This is a web based service that reads blog content, converts it to spoken words and delivers it back to the browser. It allows you to listen to my blog as spoken by a robot voice!

It's remarkably simple to set up. You simply sign up at Odiogo, provide your rss feed and your email. An hour or so later you receive an email letting you know that the audio files are complete. It is then very simple to add a button to link the file from your blog.

So is this simply a novelty? Or are there other benefits? One key advantage of this tool is that it also generates mp3 files. You can access these from the 'listen now' button. You can quickly save audio versions of blog posts that you can listen to later.