Podcasting with The Distant Librarian (sorta)

This is a little experiment.  I just found a service called Talkr that will take any RSS feed and turn the text into an mp3 file, read by a nice robot female voice.  It’s surprisingly good!  Not only can you give them an RSS feed to turn into mp3s, but I can, and have, given them my RSS feed so all my posts are automatically made available as a podcast via this feed — just plug that in to your podcast aggregator and hear my posts read by me (if I was a female-sounding robot).  You’ll also find the feed over on the right under my Subscribe  section.  Link to Podcast (RSS feed) for this blog  This service is free.

One drawback is that when I write something like "this feed", you will hear the words "this feed" read, but not the actual link.  So because I (and most bloggers) tend to be telling you about other stuff on the web, you won’t get the actual links read to you, unless of course I provide the entire URL spelled out in the post.  We’ll see.

Obvious connection to distance education (or ANY educational setting) – I absolutely guarantee that you have more visually-impaired students than you’re aware of.  What a great way to make your content more accessible!!!

Give it a listen at least.  You don’t have to use my blog as your experiment; find another one and imagine you couldn’t read it.  Listen to the mp3s created by Talkr – isn’t that about 100% better than not having access to that content at all?

Disclaimer:  Talkr does offer a revenue stream option, but I have chosen not to participate in it at this time, so I’m not getting anything if you decide you want to upgrade from their free to their paid-version.

We’ll see how this goes – I may or may not leave it turned on, though I probably will, as it’s just one more way to reach out w/o any additional work by me 🙂