As you may have already noticed, Daily Cup of Tech has a new feature: audio. Through the wonders of modern technology, I have discovered a way to convert my RSS feed into audio podcasts. Simply click on the listen now button above and turn up tour speakers!

If you are an avid podcast consumer, you can also subscribe to the audio podcast that is available in the sidebar and I have even put in two specific podcast links for iTunes and Juice (Both pieces are available as free download with iTunes being freeware and Juice being open source.).

While I am very happy to have this little feature on my blog, I would like to also share with you, my fellow blog readers, how I went about doing this with a free service. It is actually extremely easy to do which is why I think we are going to start seeing a lot more of this in the near future.

Why?

But, before we talk about how to do this, I would like to address a little bit about why I put audio on DCoT. I guess that there are really a number of reasons for doing this.

Provide Options

I think that giving the DCoT audience another way to use Daily Cup of Tech is the prime reason behind this change. To read DCoT daily requires a very specific set of actions. You need to go to your computer or RSS reader and decide to spend the time reading DCoT.

Also, DCoT is not really all that portable, especially if you are not willing to kill a few trees and print out the posts. I do realize that cell phones and portable wireless Internet devices are starting to become more popular, but you have to admit that MP3 players are even more popular than that.

Expand Audience

The other nice thing about an audio option is that it opens up a larger audience base. People who are visually impaired can now listen to DCoT without the need of any special text-to-speech hardware or software.

Audio is also a really good option for people who are too busy to sit down and read a post. You can now listen to a DCoT post while doing something else on the computer, while out for your morning jog, or even while driving to work.

How Can I Do This?

If you have a blog or website with an RSS feed, believe it or not, you have already done all of the hard work. The text-to-speech conversion is done through a free service provided by Odiogo.

Note: I do not work for nor am I paid for this post by Odiogo. I just really like the service!

To get audio set up and running on your blog, simply do the following:

1. Sign up for a free account. Make sure that all of your information is correct, especially e-mail address, website name, website URL, RSS feed URL, and blog platform. You will also need to know how many unique visitors you have a month to your blog. If you do not have a website statistics package, I suggest Google Analytics.
2. Wait for the activation e-mail. This was probably the hardest part for me because I came up with the idea one morning while getting ready for the day and I was so pumped when I found the service that I wanted it NOW! In the end, it took less than a day for them to get me set up and running. I just need to be a bit less GenX-y!
3. Prepare your blog. This can actually be done while you are waiting for the activation e-mail. Just make sure that you do not put any of these changes into effect until your feed is ready as it will just confuse your readers. There are a number of different plugins available for Blogger, TypePad/Movable Type, and WordPress.
4. Tweak your posts. There are somethings that you probably will not want to be read into your podcast. You can remove these sections by surrounding them with <!-- odiogo-notts-begin --> and <!-- odiogo-notts-end --> tags.

That’s all there is to it! Odiogo takes care of the rest of it for you! They will generate an audio RSS feed along with iTunes and Juice feeds. There is also a webpage that they dynamically generate which has all of your current podcasts along with links to your feeds.

Potential Downsides

There are a few potential downsides that may make you decide to not use this service or stop using it in the future. When you read through their terms of service (TOS) agreement, section 4 refers to fees:

You will pay Odiogo the following fees:
- Set-Up fee for each monitored RSS feed
- A Monthly Fee at the beginning of each month
- A download fee for each OMP3 file downloaded by an End-user
Fees are described in Appendix A of these TOS.
Payment should be sent to Odiogo 30 days after receipt of invoice.

When you go to Appendix A, it indicates the following:

Set-up Fee: None
Monthly Fee: None
Download Fee: None

So, while the service is free for now, it may not be in the future.

Also, they are looking at generating revenue through advertising. For now, there is only a little blurb at the beginning of each audio file indicating that the audio is created by Odiogo, I suspect that this will change, especially since they are promising to share revenue with the blogger.

Conclusion

I’m going to give this a try for a while and see what people think. I’m hoping that it will be a very useful and welcomed addition to Daily Cup of Tech.

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