Friday, May 11, 2007

Vote for Pazzo, Tag-for-Voice, Global Voices

* The other day I mentioned that one of my favorite blogs is the one manned by Tom and Brian Nealon of Roslindale's Pazzo Books. Full disclosure: I discovered the store a couple of years ago, and the proprietors have since become friends. (I buy all of my books through Pazzo; they're great at hunting down the right edition at the right price. Pazzo also sells books via eBay.) I see today that Pazzo needs your vote in WBZTV's "best bookstore" contest. Act now!

* Million-dollar idea, from [ex-Allstonian] Scot Hacker's Foobar blog:

Imagine a FireFox plugin or browser extension that, when clicked, would run the text of any page through a voice synthesizer ... but pipe the output silently to MP3 in the background, then load the generated file into my podcast aggregator. All day long I could "tag for voice" various web pages that I wished I had the time to read. When I sync'd my iPod before leaving for work, I'd have all that missed content on it, ready for the road.

Hacker is definitely onto something, there.

* Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, has a terrific post on his blog My Heart's in Accra, explaining what they're trying to do. Here's an excerpt that hits home for those of us associated with the Globe:

It's been surprisingly easy to find xenophiles who want to work on Global Voices. What's harder is finding people interested in reading what they have to say. This is the same problem that newspapers have in maintaining international coverage. If readers in the Boston area were demanding more coverage of Haiti or Russia, the Globe would likely still have foreign correspondents. If bloggers were as interested in Tunisian internet censorship as they are in cracking AACS, we'd support Global Voices on t-shirt sales alone.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:22 AM

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