An interesting concept – write your blog posts and then make that content available in audio format for anyone to listen to your blog.
This is what Talkr does using text-to-speech conversion technology that takes a blog’s RSS feed and converts such machine-readable content into speech, creating MP3 files of each individual post. You can then subscribe to the Talkr service and get those MP3s via RSS and into your podcatcher.
Here’s how they pitch the service to listeners:
Do you have enough time to read your favorite blogs? Are you staying current with the blogs that cover your profession? What if your computer could download a spoken word version of any text blog, and automatically put it on your mp3 player? Wouldn’t that make your commute more interesting? Talkr continually monitors the web’s most popular blogs and makes them available to your mp3 player – 24 hours a day.
You can sign up to get three blogs as podcasts without cost. More than that, you need to sign up for the subscription service which starts at $4.95 per month for up to 20 hours of audio.
To get your blog posts re-purposed as podcasts, you join the Talkr Partner programme. This is free as your posts will become the content that listeners sign up for. Talkr offers an earnings model where they pay partners a revenue share if one of their readers subscribes to Talkr’s service. And if you opt in to have Talkr include ads in your blog post podcasts, there’s a revenue share opportunity there, too.
I’ve listened to a couple of MP3s from blogs already in the service, and I’m quite impressed by the quality of the voice I hear speaking the content of a blog post. A female voice on the ones I’ve listened to, an American accent, has pretty good natural voice intonation and rhythm. A bit of clipping here and there but almost conversational. That’s a key element to the service – what you hear has to be easy on the ear: easy to understand and spoken in a way that doesn’t give you a headache.
So I’ve signed up for it. My interest is seeing how this all works, not the revenue opportunity, and whether it is an idea that could catch on. I’ve not opted in for ads.
If you want to listen to any of my blog posts, here’s the link:
In Windows, right-click on the image, copy the shortcut and paste it into the appropriate place in your podcatcher to subscribe to the RSS feed.
I’d be most interested to hear what you think.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.