People who have difficulty reading—because they’re blind or dyslexic, or they access large sites using small mobile devices—have difficulty using the Internet. ReadSpeaker has been providing a hosted service to European sites so that users can click on a button and have a Web page (or a portion of it) read out loud. I met with the ReadSpeaker team today.

ReadSpeaker uses other folks’ text-to-speech renderers, running it on their servers. Today they work in 12 languages (the European ones, plus Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese), and have 600 customers. Some are sites aiming at providing accessibility (including the British Museum and Vodaphone) and some are Big Content companies (Herald Tribune, Handelsblatt) that have commercial reasons for making their text more widely read. The accessibility sites pay a fee to ReadSpeaker (about €5000/year) while the content sites use an advertising model. For sites they render, ReadSpeaker can also render the text and layout to meet accessibility guidelines. (The lead developer is blind, by the way.) ReadSpeaker claims to have 25M users per year. Now they want to make inroads in the US, and are reaching out to the blogosphere.

For blogs, they will have two offerings, perhaps later this month. One is a small aggregator that lets you add three feeds of your choice, for free. You can play them, add them to iTunes, or retrieve them on a mobile browser through a compact html page they generate. Second, you can provide your readers with a link that takes them to a ReadSpeaker page that links to the spoken version of your posts, or subscribes them to a podcast version of your feed, generated automatically. ReadSpeaker is offering this for free. At some point, they may offer an advanced version that comes with advertising.

Users can submit suggestions for correcting pronunciations, which is a nice feature.

You can subscribe to the audible version of the Joho RSS feed here or listen to posts here. The audo rendering seems good and it’s a service some people may want or need. So, why wouldn’t I—and you—offer it on our blogs? [Tags: readspeak accessibility]

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Technorati has introduced a promising new feature. Click on the “Blog reactions” link at the bottom of a post and you’ll be taken to a list of other blogs that have linked to that post.

This is functionally like trackbacks but instead of including only blogs that actively notify other blogs when they link, it takes advantage of the fact that Technorati is indexing so much of the blogosphere. If it sees a link to one of your posts, it adds it to the list of blog reactions.

I am on Technorati’s advisory board (disclosure) and will be advising them to let blog owners set the color of the link and to get rid of the Technorati logo. [Tags: blogs technorati trackbacks]

Later that day: The blog reactions are making my page load too slowly, at least intermittently. Or maybe I just hit a rough patch on the Information Highway. In any case, I’m removing the links until I understand better where the problem is.

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Brad of BradSucks has thrown together an RSS aggregator for himself that he calls his Temple of Ego (because he is the most self-deprecating person around). It puts out a feed of all that’s been outputing—his delicious tags, his Google shares, his Flickr photos, his blog posts. So, if you subscribe you get a stream of everything Brad, and you can be assured of continuing to get, say, his photos even if he switches from Flickr to some other photo site. (Brad says he saw the idea at Adactio.) [Tags: bradsucks rss ]

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Garth Turner, the Canadian member of parliament who was kicked out of the Conservative party for blogging (ok, so I’m probably oversimplifying) is still blogging away, and more committed than ever to using connective technology to reinvigorate democracy. [Tags: garth_turner canada politics blogging ]

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The blog of The Sunlight Foundation, a group I admire, has been named the best blog in the world, in a competition organized by a German broadcaster, with judges from around the world.

The Sunlight Foundation has an excellent blog, and it looks great in a swimsuit, but the notion of “the best blog in the world” would sit sort of awkwardly on any site, don’t you think?

Anyway, congrats to the Foundation and to all the little people who made it possible :) [Tags: blogs sunlight_foundation]

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Sir Tim corrects The Guardian: He thinks blogging is grrreeat! (Thanks to Sir Euan Semple for the link.) [Tags: tbl blogging ]

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Yesterday, the Berkman Center hosted a small party for local political bloggers. John Palfrey had us pause for a moment so the attendees could introduce themselves. A sampling: Betsy Devine has tracked the NH phone bank scandal. A professor from Northeastern blogs as a media watchdog. Rick Burnes of FaneuilMedia is plotting political donations on Google maps. Several folks from BlueMassGroup, a Democratic blog that’s also a community, were there. Matt Margolis, founder of Blogs for Bush, a site that’s kept its flame alive two years after the election, was there; he runs a Massachusetts site to rally the state’s overwhelmed conservatives. Steve Garfield told how he posted fantastic footage he’d shot of Deval Patrick at a rally, while the conventional news media all missed the moment. And many more; I didn’t do a systematic job of writing down names and blogs.

My point isn’t that there was a cloud of luminaries at the Berkman last night, well la-di-da. I don’t think there was an “A-list” blogger among us. And that’s my point. As we went around the room, I got chills realizing how far we’ve come. Capturing remarkable moments, tracking scandals — every issue has her blogger — monitoring the media, rallying supporters, mashing up financial info…we’re doing it all. We take it for granted. But it’s changed how the world works. And we’re only at the beginning.

The Boston Globe’s circulation is down 7% this year, falling from 414,000 to 386,000. Boston’s other daily paper (well, not counting the Metro), fell 12% to 203,000. The Globe’s Sunday circulation fell 10% to 587,000.

The Globe was already in financial trouble. The path it’s currently on predictably leads to scaling back in coverage and running more syndicated articles. If the current decline continues it’s hard to see how the Globe can survive. And that would be a disaster. A newspaper is greater than the sum of the knowledge, talent and experience it aggregates.

Another reminder of how much things have changed: The discontent about the use of electronic voting machines has become an issue almost entirely because of the Web. The people who have made it an issue are not reporters but scientists and researchers who have published directly to readers. That’s how they’ve gotten traction. And that’s new. [Tags: media politics blogging berkman]

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Pito Salas explains how BlogBridge’s topic guides work, and how you can use their Feed Library software product to create your own. BlogBridge is a well-intentioned, free, open source blog aggregator that works across platforms. I’m a user and an advocate. (I’m also an uncompensated advisor: disclosure) [Tags: blogbridge aggregators open_source pito_salas rss]

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I haven’t blogged anything about the recent discovery that “Wal-Marting across America,” a blog recounting the travels of a couple from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, was in fact funded by Wal-Mart through Edelman PR. In its wake (1 2), Edelman disclosed that Working Families for Wal-Mart and its subsidiary site, Paid Critics, are also Edelman sites. It seems to me unambiguously wrong for Edelman to fund sites for clients without making that clear on the sites themselves. I haven’t blogged that (until now) in part because it’s so obvious and in part because, as a consultant to Edelman, I’m in a conflict.

By contract and body language, Edelman has not attempted to control or influence what I blog. Never. There are, however, three important inhibiting factors. First, no matter how genuine and warm the relationship, taking money from an organization taints what one thinks about that organization; that’s why I have repeatedly disclosed my relationship. Second, as a consultant, I’ve been in a position to observe how the company interacts, what sorts of ideas it contemplates and rejects, and what it embraces enthusiastically or reluctantly. It would betray their trust — and get me fired as a consultant, and keep other companies from hiring me — if I were to blab about that stuff. But that makes it hard for me to write about an affair such as the Wal-Mart one, even though I didn’t know about it beforehand. Third, As a result of consulting to the company for the past year and a half or so, I’ve developed personal relationships with people there, including with Richard Edelman, whom I’m proud to count as a friend. I’m not objective.

So, with that in mind:

Edelman’s non-transparency about its Wal-Mart programs erode the trust that makes the Blogosphere valuable. It also forces the question of whether professional PR has any place in the Blogosphere.

I think it does, but it’s not going to be an easy transition. Full transparency is the minimum requirement. But, that’s not enough. Being transparent about funding blogs is hardly what it means to do enlightened PR on the Web.

I personally think there are two fundamental roles for PR in the new world: Transparent advocacy and facilitating open, genuine engagement among customers and companies. Transparent advocacy means that the agency argues for its client, providing useful information to people who want to receive it. Genuine engagement means the agency helps its client participate in the Web conversation honestly and frankly, whether that’s through employee blogging, customer forums, or ways yet to be invented. Just as the agency can be a transparent advocate for the client on the Web, it should be an advocate for Web values to the client, counseling the client to be frank, honest, and open to criticism. (An agency may also create publicity stunts, but there’s nothing particularly webby about that.)

I also want to add — keeping in mind the three factors that mitigate against my credibility on this topic — that I believe that Edelman PR overall is genuinely committed to behaving well on the Web. That it has gone so wrong in the Wal-Mart instances is an indication of just how different the Web is, and how difficult it is for an agency that has bet its future on getting the Web right to break free of its long-learned instincts. PR has a long road ahead of it.

[Tags: blogging pr edelman wal-mart]

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Another blow against candor. Story here. (Thanks to Richard Hamilton for the link.)

(Completely coincidentally, I’m in Toronto for a day to talk to the Canadian Marketing Association.) [Tags: blogging politics canada]

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