Over the last few years, many industry experts and analysts have published reports on the future of newspapers. In May ’09, BBC’s Stephen Evans dedicated one of the daily episodes of Business Daily Today to this topic. The whole podcast is very interesting; we were particularly captivated by one of Evans’ guests, Roger Pary who is the former CEO of the international division of Clear Channel. On the audio media Pary says: We love getting information through our ears (…) it actually replicates one of the key human senses which is hearing (…) the use of audio material has a very very solid future…

Needless to say, we approve those views which sound like… music to our ears!
It seems the BBC doesn’t keep an archive of the past programs. Short of finding a link to the full podcast, here’s an excerpt of the interview © BBC.

Mashable’s Doriano “Paisano” Carta published this week-end another of his popular HOW TO: articles. In his post titled HOW TO: Convert Your Blog Into a Podcast on iTunes for Free, Paisano provides a detailed step-by-step guide for Text-to-Speech conversion using Odiogo. The author stresses the added value brought to the visually impaired and also to readers with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. As a demonstration of the ease of use and set-up, Paisano helped Rachel from Why Not Rachel set-up Odiogo on her blog.

After detailing the plethora of features provided by Odiogo and listing other players in the space, the author concludes as follows:

Providing greater accessibility to your content makes a great deal of sense for several reasons. It not only gives your readers more ways to experience your blog, but it also allows many others to enjoy your work that otherwise couldn’t do so. Text-to-speech technology continues to improve with time, so look for this feature to spread across the blogosphere, slowly but surely as people realize that the web isn’t just for viewing but for hearing too.

See also, the discussion thread inspired by this post on mashable, especially Rachel’s comment:

You have no idea how wonderful, and liberating adaptive tech has been for people with print disabilities! I’m really grateful to Pai for helping to make my site more accessible…

The WordPress MU Administrator needs to install the plugin as follows:

1. Click menu Site Admin > Options
2. Make sure option Plugins is checked, if not, check the option and click Update Options
3. Download the Odiogo Listen Button WordPress Plugin
4. Upload directory odiogo_listen_button to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory via FTP

The instructions to be provided for bloggers to to activate Odiogo on their blogs are:

1. Sign-up freehere
2. Login to your WordPress admin account
3. Click menu Plugins and click Activate for Odiogo Listen Button
4. Click Settings > Odiogo Listen Button
5. Enter your Odiogo Feed ID specified in your Odiogo Activation Email and click Save
6. Click Design > Widgets and click Add for Odiogo Subscribe Button
7. Click Save Changes

WBIR-TV from the Gannett group ran this story on Odiogo’s deployment on the WBIRTV.com site.
Enjoy!

This short ‘how-to’ video shows how easy it is to deploy the Odiogo widget on a TypePad blog.
Stay tuned as more videos are on the way!

Give your TypePad blog voice … and legs! from Odiogo on Vimeo.

mojoPortal, is an open source web site framework and content management system written in C# that runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under Mono on Linux or Mac OS X.

Its latest release includes a tight integration with Odiogo: mojo users just need to sign-up to the Odiogo service and insert their Odiogo feed ID in the settings page:

Once both fields are set, voil! the Listen Button shows under each post’s title.

We’re happy to announce the availability of the popular ListenButton functionality for Squarespace blogs. Please follow the instructions below:

1. Go to your Squarespace Journal (Blog)
2. Click edit section html on the sidebar
3. Select Raw HTML from the drop-down list
4. Copy and paste the code below in the textbox. Make sure to replace FEED_ID by your Odiogo Feed ID
5. Click Save & Close

<script language=”javascript” src=”http://widget.odiogo.com/odiogo_js.php?feed_id=FEED_ID&platform=squarespace&code=1&show_sub_button=1″ type=”text/javascript”></script>

Good news for iPhone and iPod Touch owners: The January 2008 update (aka firmware 1.1.3) includes support for the lyrics option. With this feature, Odiogo users can visualize on their device the text content of an article or blog post of an Odiogo feed. This is helpful for those who want to quickly browse through a story before reading it.

More on this feature in a previous post.

We usually keep these for our testimonials page… but could not resist blogging about it: the February ‘08 edition of Stuff Magazine (UK) lists us as Essential Webware, qualifying Odiogo as a genius website…

We’re honored - thanks!

Good news for the tens of thousands of BlogEngine.NET users - Mads Kristensen sent us the following note:

I’ve been using your service for the past several weeks now and I’m very impressed with the quality. So, I’ve created an extension for all BlogEngine.NET users that let’s them use your service very easily.

We did not have the time yet to deploy and test this extension, but you are invited to give it a try. More details on Mads’blog.

Thanks Mads!

For those who are not familiar with BlogEngine.NET:

BlogEngine.NET is a full featured blogging platform that is a breeze to setup, customize, and use. A small download and easy to follow instructions get you up and running in minutes. Pick one of our elegant default themes or make your own theme. Extend the functionality by creating your own custom control or add some of the many built into the system. More.