Odiogo: Robo-Blogger

Visitors to FND Blog will now notice these new Odiogo buttons above every post. Odiogo is a new web service from an Israeli startup that harvests blog posts and converts them to audio files for online playback. Just click the button and a small Ajax app appears and begins playing back your text in spoken word. Try it on a few clips.

In addition, the developers have provided an Odiogo Podcast chicklet. Clicking this button will allow you to subscribe to the entire blog as a podcast feed. I have put my button on the right sidebar.

I don't podcast but I guess a fair amount of people do and if you have any blind visitors, this will save you a lot on braille transcriptions. The speech quality is not too bad either. Frankly, I was expecting something along the lines of a drunk Stephen Hawking but was pleasantly surprised at the lilting Pierce Brosnan quality. Even though RB talks in a flat affect with no pacing or inflection, he does manage to uptalk at every question mark.

The down sides? The increased overhead translates into longer page load times. There seems to be a 30-60 minute lag time for the O-servers to crunch on your post. And there's no guarantee the company won't someday outsource this service to Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.

All in all, pretty slick. I like the benefits without all the recording, editing and production headaches. Web 2.0 ... the lazy man's Internet.

UPDATE: As of 9/3 I am turning off the service temporarily as Finjan is flagging my site with a big red "X" because of malicious code it has found behind the Podcast button. I have contacted Odiogo about this claim and will report back up when I get to the bottom of it.