Readspeaker turns blogs into podcasts

I came across the blog service Readspeaker on David Weinberger's blog and have to talk about it. I had this idea myself when I was working at Mindcomet. It creates a podcast feed from the text on a blog using tect-to-speech.

Love this.

My idea was for newspapers. Now that I know more about rss, I'd revise my original idea and post it as such:

On the New York Times podcast page, there could be podcast feeds for each section of the printed newspaper. (My original idea went with the notion that people went to nytimes.com and clicked around, so the buttons labeled "mp3" would be located beside each headline. This auto-generation would prevent The New York Times from spending a dime on paying people to podcast their stories if they ever wanted to do that.

I wish they did.

For example, I listen to cnet.com's podcast "Buzz Out Loud." I do not visit the site regularly. Why? I like to listen to my news, not read it. If cnet had their news rss available as podcasts, I'd listen. Therefor, I'd be "reading" the content on their site without having to go through the trouble (and time) of reading. And cnet.com could put advertising on these podcasts automatically using one of those services that does that stuff.