Idea: "Textpodder" -- A GUI for Textcasting

Update: I have written a Windows program called Audiolicious that lets you turn any RSS feed into a podcast. You'll find it over here.

Note: I have not implemented this GUI yet. It's just an idea I have: Textpodder. Like iPodder did for podcasting, Textpodder would be a GUI that would let you add RSS feeds to convert to podcasts, but using text-to-speech. You could subscribe to different blogs, and each one would get their posts converted to MP3s and placed in the appropriate directory. Just like iPodder, but for text.

The blogosphere has heard complaints about the quality of podcast content being quite poor, compared to the written word on the web. Textcasting nicely solves this by combining the quality of textual content with the convenience of mobile audio, thanks to the magic of text-to-speech.

It's a neat idea. Bloggers who are hopeless verbal communicators, but fantastic writers -- authors who hadn't originally intended their writings to be read aloud -- unwittingly become instant podcasters through textcasting.

And who makes the textcasts? The author (push)? The end-user (pull)? A third party? These are all interesting modalities.