twitter fail blog

We discovered a new (to us) blog text-to-audio (aka: text-to-speech) plugin today, thanks to alert Honorary Fail Bird Handler @jackassletters and @MurrayNewland (who interviewed us before – have you seen it?).

This plugin is from Odiogo.com. They convert your feed to audio, and give people the opportunity to subscribe to that audio feed. This is a real eye-opener. We think the results are nearly pee-your-pants funny, but we wonder – is this how blind people see the web? If it’s as bad as this, that sucks.

The written word is often misunderstood because it lacks the inflection and body language of a face-to-face meeting. Text-to-audio readers miss that, too. And, unfortunately, this reader can’t tell which are the punch lines, when we’re serious, and where to pause. We understand now why some people prefer to create audio or video recordings of their blogs, so that the stuff that is really meaningful, or funny, or stupid, comes across the way it is intended.

Here are the last 5 blog posts in mp3 by Odiogo. What do you think? Is this a feature we should keep? Do you love it, hate it? Or are you one of the 12 percent who will register your lack of opinion either way?

If, for some reason, you’d like to subscribe to the audio version of our blog, click here and select your reader, or paste the following link into your podcast client: http://podcasts.odiogo.com/twitter-fail-blog/podcasts-xml.php

We hope that the meter and wordplay we employ for this blog deliver the appropriate level of humor, sarcasm, or snarkiness. If they don’t, perhaps the Odiogo mp3′s will make up for our poor writing skills and give you a chuckle or two. We admit it – their text-to-audio reader makes our blog sound way funnier than it really is.