Pretty Sassy

In the past several months podcasts have started to mature in a way that is giving them a lot more validity.  A year ago most podcasts seemed horribly corporatized or so amatuer that they were impossible to listen to.

Part of it is that several respected players (Leo Laport and many well loved NPR shows) hooked up with iTunes for professional content made highly accessible and updatable.

I had been avoiding podcasts for the longest time until I read this post by Meg of notmartha.org showing some of her cooler finds for the podcasts.  I decided to try podcasting again.  It’s been love ever since.

From NPR I love to listen to:
This American Life
The Splendid Table

From TWIT(Leo Laport’s company)
The Tech Guy(The syndicated radio show): A show that’s primarily technology callin/answer.  The mister loves this one.
Munchcast: Cami Blackstone and Leo Laport dish dirt on geek food. 

FlyLady:
Okay, you know how I just complained about amatuerish radio.  But this podcast has it’s charms and it’s place.  Flylady is author and runs a website about getting your life and home in order in a few dabs of 15 minutes a day.  The geek girl population does not feel like the key audience(that seems to be overwhelmed mothers), but the sentiments are right on.   The show is a little dorky for the wired set, but just like the Disney ride “It’s a small world”, you feel happier after all is done and said.  The podcast is a callin format where overwhelmed women call in for advice.  Flylady Marla Cilley and cohost Dinner Dive are sincere and seem to take a lot of joy in helping.  Think of it like Oprah without the production budget.   

Lipgloss and Laptops:
This was the podcast that got me all started.  Lipgloss and Laptops is two canadian women who write reviews about beauty products, makeup and life.  It’s really fun and well put together.  The women have no budget restrictions so crazy expensive night cream might be compared in the same show as Wet and Wild lipstick.

 Podcasts Rock!
Kelly

When I heard the name Odiogo a few weeks ago I thought..  Huh?  Carmen Sandiego?  Beloved video game of the sweet, sweet Apple IIe.  I not only loved the game Carmen Sandiego, I also loved the TV Show of  the same name on PBS.

But Odiego is not Carmen Sandiego.  It’s an audible blog reader.  So instead of just subscribing to a blog rss feed and READING it, you can download and listen to it on your ipod or computer. 

I just registered for the free service at http://www.odiogo.com.  After some necessary configuration on Odiogo’s side, they provided me with an email of how to integrate odiogo into my blog.  Pretty sweet.

****Beware.  Nerd Talk!!
The technology uses text-to-speech.  This means that the blog is converted into voice in realtime.  Theoretically.  Actually it appears from the faq that odiogo crawls it’s rss feeds every few hours and converts the text into speech and turns it into an mp3 file that it posts to it’s servers. 
*****End of Nerd Talk!!!

The voice is male and a little dry and ever so gently downtrodden and serious.  Sort of like a cnn newscast about shoeless puppies.  When it trips over wacky spelling it spells the word letter by letter.  It’s pretty smooth, but definitely isn’t perfect.

The fact that I have a cnn-sounding voice at my disposal makes me want to make it say things like “dork pants” and ”I am a weasel head”.  But I wouldn’t do that because that is improper.

Right now it seems that only a handful of blogs use Odiogo which is sad.  Because the idea of getting all your favorite blogs sent onto your ipod every morning for commute time would be a real timesaver.

But the question I really have is this.  What the heck does the word Odiogo mean?