Saturday, December 22, 2007

O'Reilly reads its blogs to you

OMG this is cool. Looks like most of O'Reilly's blogs have a reader built in (through the ReadSpeaker service). The voice is understandable, and if you don't like the embedded player, you can download MP3s for portability. Apparently this has been online since at least April 2007, and it's still being perfected; O'Reilly has a clearly linked feedback form every time you listen. Here are a few bugs I noticed:

  • It reads some graphic alt-text to me. Accessibility maybe, but irritating to me.
  • There seems to be a word or time limit on the length. I could only get it to read me short articles.
  • It resizes my Firefox browser window every time I click the "listen" link.
O'Reilly is a great source of blogs, and I have a terrible time keeping up with them. Sounds like a playlist in the making. Check out this entry on .htaccess, or for you bohemian types, here's a article on Dave Byrne. Click on "listen" in the upper right.

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