Listen To Blogs!

After what was perhaps the most intense coding sprint (or marathon) I’ve ever been part of, Henrik, David and I launched Listen To Blogs about 5 minutes before the deadline of the absolutely great 24 hour business camp event yesterday. The idea came from Henrik, who wanted a way of listening to blogs in podcast format that didn’t have anything to do with dull text-to-speech.

The solution is a crowd-sourcing site where anybody can upload a podcast version of any blog post. You can use the platform to upload audio versions of your own blog post, or simply try your reading skills by recording an audio version of your favorite blog. On the site you can then tune in to the podcast feeds from any blog on the web. This is me reading “Our Desire for Backchannels” from this blog, for example.

To build this site in 24 hours we used no less than two clouds (AWS and Google) and three great services (Twingly for blog metadata, SoundCloud for audio hosting, App engine for application hosting). It’s pretty mind-boggling to think about the amount of computers involved in making all this work so smoothly. And what does it cost? $10 for a domain…

You can read more about the project here and vote for us in the 24HBC competition here.

This entry was posted by Eric on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 1:47 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized and has these tags: , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • I wonder why AWS does not cost you a anything?

    I did several little projects on AppEngine and ever wanted to try AWS but never did, because I expect it to be too complicated and expensive when running an instance 24/7
  • PS: Listen to blogs: great idea!

    But you should add RSS/Atom feeds to the home page.
  • @richie AWS is free since it's used by SoundCloud to transcode and host files, and not by us directly. RSS/Atom on first page is a good idea, we'll add it.
  • I've read some of your post and they are very informative, nice job.
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