I just added this neat tool to the sidebar on this blog - feed2podcast which I found on Vincent’s blog “A Feed is Born“. It takes the rss feed of your blog and converts it to audio. So all your postings have their own audio feed to go along with the text feed. This is a nice tool for converting your blog into a audio, but I would definitely not call in podcasting.

Here’s “Tech Musings” audio and rss feed via feed2podcast.

Podcasts are a richer experience, more like radio shows rather than simple audio files. Perhaps to make it more podcast like it would be nice to add some sort of personal intro to the audio file. The computer voice is decent, but it would have been nice to have a few voices to choose from when I create this feed and be able to tag into my posts different voices for different parts of a post. So if I did an interview I could have different voices for each person in the interview. Hopefully there will be a way to get rid of the promo ad for feed2podcast at the end of each audio file too. (Really - any audio editor can clip the ad)

What is really cool though is some of the educational implications when you can quickly convert ANY text to an audio file, all you need is a disposiable blog with an RSS feed that is including complete postings. So if you have online text put them in a posting, convert them to audio and download to your mp3 player. The implications are endless - stories for students, web site instructions, articles, maybe make your own audio books for your class.

I can see this really coming in useful for students who are struggling with reading, and are able to listen along to blog postings.