Feed2podcast Turns Blog Into Chatterbox

The guys from Feed2podcast have delivered a new piece of software that may turn your blog into a chatterbox. This may prove useful if you have bad eyesight but this is not all. It can be really useful to bloggers who want to unleash the multimedia revolution without having to turn themselves into radio presenters. All you need to do is write a text and Feed2podcast will turn your RSS feed into a live audio narrowcast where people can select whichever article they desire. The technology used by Feed2podcast is known as “text to speech”, now a fairly established technology enabling machines to read text almost “naturally”. Free version limited to 1 RSS feed per user and English only.

Cafe Delocator Declares War on Uniformity

Thank god, it’s not just a few old gits from Old Europe who seem to be fed up with these faceless standardised, uniformed coffee houses which are cropping up all over the world. A group of anti marketing coffee house activists has decided to create a delocator to promote their idea of a good café. This delocator is very useful and simple. Just enter a post(zip) code in the input box and press the ‘delocate’ button and you will be able to display a number of alternatives to these despised standard cafés. You can try it with a Manhattan (10452) zip by clicking here. Last but not least, the Delocator Toolkit will enable you to create your own coffee delocator and install it on your website.

• The Delocator Home Page
• A pre-filled request with the Atherton zip code, CA (94027)
• The Delocator toolkit

http://www.delocator.net/index_full.php

Web 2.0 Gone Mad

It’s not because you are a collaborative work enthusiast that you have to agree with everything that is going on in the name of so-called WEB 2.0. A USA today editorial published on Nov 29th entitled “A false Wikipedia biography” is making our hair stand on end. How come anybody can log in to a system as visible as Wikipedia and fabricate a biography for a living person. Besides, other online encyclopedias have copied this information too. One may imagine what it would be if someone started to rewrite history in that manner. Historical characters would not be able to rise from the dead in order to correct such mistakes. In retrospect, this is more than just outrageous. What we are seeing here is the end of a myth around collaboration, it is Web 2.0 gone mad (see previous entry about Nicholas Carr’s latest article against the Web 2.0 craze). And Web 2.0 gone mad is just like 1984(*) with people rewriting history as they like. There has to be – eventually – limits to our freedom of speech, and these limits are set by the general interest. Failing to understand this would definitely kill Web 2.0 and the wonderful tools brought by the Internet. (*) George Orwell, 1984, Penguin Books Ltd ISBN: 0140126716.

Christopher Allen’s History of Social Software

The evolution of Social Software according to Christopher Allen is available online in his blog entitled “Life with Alacrity“.

Amazing Online Jukebox Pandora Could Make Long Tail Even Longer

The Pandora project enables you to create your own radio stations based on music you liked and delivering new titles you hadn’t thought of or even didn’t know that they existed. It’s a great way to discover new artists. Could it be considered a new media? Could it replace your good old radio one day? Should we even envisage that future radios – being connected to the Internet – could deliver that kind of programme through your radio set or hifi tuner?

Besides, should we consider that this is the beginning of the end of real-time radio listening as we knew it. What is certain is that if we were to replace our regular radio stations with online widgets like these, we could actually wave goodbye to radio commercials as we know them. Or should we invent new forms of commercials instead?

Emergence Marketing

Emergence Marketing is another weblog dedicated to Marketing & Innovation. Gabe D’Annunzio and François Gossiaux are its owners, and the owners of Corante. Corante is an initiative aimed at creating a network (the Corante Network) and hubs where each hub is a handled by experts. So in a way, it’s a semi open social network where each hub contributor is an expert and not just a Mr Nobody. See Corante’s Marketing blog page which is packed with Marketing & Social material. Exciting new venture. FYI, François Gossiaux is the former head of Marketing for Eroom, a company that was taken over by Documentum (itself acquired by EMC)

Access 250 newspapers from 55 countries

PressDisplay.com is a website which publishes pdf versions of a great number of newspapers From Around the World. I have been amazed by its ability to let you browse through the list of available countries and then choose the desired newspaper. This is actually triggering a question. One may think that journalists are shooting themselves in the foot by publishing (or letting others publish) their information online. Of course, some of it – mainly the archives are only accessible to subscribers. For instance, Time magazine will let subscribers print and read Time online if you have a valid username and password. But secure access does not prevent sharing, and it is yet to be proven that openness is beneficial for contents providers. Of course, it enables people from remoter locations to look at these newspapers that they would not be able to buy anyway. By the way, access to the information contained by the website is not free. When provinding your email address (check those spammers!) you will be able to test the Web site for 7 days and 7 issues for free.

PERFORMANCING: A Blog Editor That Sits Within Firefox

Performancing is a brand new Blog editor that sits within your Firefox browser. It enables users who are new to blogging to create a blog very easily.
It also enables you to upload a file to your blog, but the limit set on file uploads is very low. Not quite sure what the benefit of using Performancing is compared to Blogger or another online blogging system. Explanations/comments welcome …