Real Techno
Over the last year or so, I've been heavily into listening and viewing audio and video content from the Internet. Mostly it's technology oriented but there's also a mix of other subject areas. The great thing about audio content is that you can do something else but still have your hands, eyes and feet free i.e. you can be doing other activities and have the audio on in the background. This is nothing new, but the difference for me now is access to a large range of niche content for people interested in technology. Take for example IT Conversations, Dot Net Rocks, The Server Side, The Server Side.Net, The .NET Show, MSDN TV, MSDN Web casts, Audible.com, Ken Radio and Web Talk Guys.
Just recently, my tech media content modus operandi has changed a bit. In a period where there wasn't much new content from my usual free media sources, I decided to start converting interesting web articles and the longer blog entries into audio using Text Aloud with some decent voices. It works surprisingly well when the article/blog entries are written in a conversational manner, though its a crappy approach whenever there's lots of code or diagrams being referred to in the article or post. Another aspect that surprised me was how even reasonably short articles turn into long audio content. Its really quite obvious, but the ratio of the time taken to listen compared to the time taken to read was much higher than expected.
There's a lot of scope for apps that leverage TTS (text to speech) to produce audio content. An esoteric example, would be a TTS application that navigates through a wiki generating an audio presentation of the information in the wiki. The app could use the link structure amongst the wiki pages, link popularity and date of modification to identify the structure of the linear audio output. Going through something like Martin Fowler's bliki would produce some great audio content i.e. "real techno".