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Filed under: Audio, Podcasting, Web services

Listen to your blogs as podcasts with VocalFruits

VocalFruit
Ever wish your computer could read your RSS feeds to you? Or how about being able to download your feeds as a podcast and listen to them in the car on the way to work?

VocalFruits is a new service from xFruits that will read out loud to you. It takes a few dozen steps to sign up for the free service. But once you do, you can listen to a mildly annoying computerized voice read your feeds on a website or save the feed as a podcast.

The idea is great, and the execution is... decent. The digitized voice does a pretty good job with punctuation, pausing and stopping at most of the right points. But it also voices the "read," "permalink," "email this," and "comments" section at the bottom of each Download Squad post. These sort of programs haven't yet figured out the difference between the body of a blog post and the extra data that most blogs and news websites include.

[via StartupSquad]

Filed under: Blogging, E-mail, Web services

xFruits: Do stuff with RSS

xFruits

Thanks to a funny name, lack of descriptive text, and somewhat muddled English, it took me awhile to figure out what xFruits is. Basically it's a free web service that lets you do some interesting stuff with RSS feeds. Currently it has four functions: One lets you aggregate multiple RSS feeds into a single one, another (I think) republishes an RSS feed to a blog-like web page, another will take an RSS feed and turn it into a mobile-friendly web page, and the last will publish an RSS feed of all e-mail sent to an @xfruits.com e-mail address. We've seen all of these functions done before, but xFruits has the distinction of rolling them all up into one login. It also has a social aspect: The xFruiters page lists other xFruit users and what xFruits they've set up, along with the obligatory tag cloud. Judging from the front page, xFruit has a lot more functionality coming up, like "RSS to PDF," "RSS to Mail," and "File to RSS."

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