ReadWriteWeb

Ohio State University doctoral student and researcher Aryn Karpinski announced a study today indicating that students who use Facebook also have lower GPA scores and study less. The study got picked up by traditional news media sites like UPI and Fox News. A lot of the media reports (including Fox News') opportunistically called Facebook the culprit, which we believe the study doesn't seem to prove conclusively at all.

Ted Gilchrist pointed to a new text-to-voice service he's running called Botcast Network. He's created a special podcast feed for my blog, so you can regularly listen to my blog posts being spoken in a robot voice.

I actually already had a text-to-voice service running on Read/WriteWeb, Talkr, so I thought I'd compare the two services. Here is Talkr reading my recent post about my MT upgrade and here is Botcast Network reading the same post. In terms of voice output, Botcast uses a male robot and the quality is a little faltering. Talkr uses a female robot voice and runs smoother (it's also quite alluring...but I digress).

To subscribe to a robot podcast of Read/WriteWeb in Talkr, use this feed (registration required I think). In Botcast Network, use this feed. Either way, it's great to see innovation happening in text-to-voice, because it makes the Web accessible to blind people and those with vision problems.