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A couple months ago, I got an email from Daniel Magliola asking me if I’d like Hear a Blog to narrate The Daily WTF. I almost immediately replied “no thanks”, thinking that the last thing anyone wanted was TDWTF’s articles read by some Cylon-sounding program. But to my surprise, they don’t use text-to-speech software; they use real, professional narrators. Go ahead, give it a listen.
The Russian Plan
It’s a pretty neat system and, as you might expect, there’s a podcast feed dedicated to narrated TDWTF articles: http://hearablog.com/sites/the-daily-wtf.rss. Obviously, not all of the content on The Daily WTF is appropriate for narration (Code SOD, Error’d, etc), so the feed only contains articles worthwhile listening to. Subscribe with your preferred podcast player: iPhone, Droid, or if you have good taste in cell phones, your Nokia E72.
What’s even cooler, though, is that the audio feed will sometimes contain articles from the future. I’m not sure exactly how the Hear a Blog folks have managed to bend time, but what this means for you is that the audio feed will generally be updated a day or two before the written story goes live.
In addition to The Daily WTF, there’s some other publications that Hear a Blog has partnered with to narrate:
- Smart Bear - Startups + Marketing + Geekery. From someone who's been there: Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software.
- Coding Horror - programming and human factors, from Jeff Atwood
- Jason Calacanis - entrepreneur and journalist behind TWiST (This Week in Startups)
I'm hoping we'll start seeing more, especially since I'm finding that I have more listening time than reading time these days. If you have any suggestions, let them know. Otherwise, enjoy TDWTF on audio! Here's the link again...
http://hearablog.com/sites/the-daily-wtf.rss
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