Lewies Blog

I forgot to mention that my free T-Shirt came in the mail the other day. It was pretty late considering that I received my free iPod a few weeks earlier. Unfortunately, the shirt came in the color of white. I’ll get over it.

I’m starting to notice something. I haven’t even listened to my XM radio since I received my iPod. I would listen to XM every day at work and on my commute. Now it is iPod all the time.

After rating many of my songs, I don’t listen to much else except for those rated with 5 stars. Sometimes I’ll look up an album or an artist depending on my mood – but most of the time I stick to the 5 stars playlist that I created.

In my commute into work I’ll either listen to Podcast Paul or Dark Compass. If they haven’t published anything by the time that I take off, then it’s music on the way in. Sometimes I might listen to a podcast from the BritCaster.

I also finished completing beta testing of NewsworthyAudio. For those of you who do not know, Newsworthy Audio is a news service that takes articles from mainstream news papers and uses text-to-speech utilities to serve them as MP3’s. It is very similar to Talkr wich does the same thing for blogs (or anything with an RSS feed). Besides text-to-speech, NewsworthyAudio also hires professional readers as well.

It was only a week long and I didn’t bother testing on Saturday or Sunday as I didn’t have to commute to work. As soon as the weekend comes, I am no longer a news junkee. When the test ended, I was invited to attend a focus group after work in the following week. They served dinner and also handed me a crisp $100 bill. It was interesting to see the kind of folks that were there. One participant claimed that he worked with Syndic8.

It appeared that a few people couldn’t tell the difference between the text conversion audio and the professional readers. I’ve heard quite a few speech engines out there and must admit that theres was pretty good. I was able to tell that it was a converted text feed though. I don’t know if it is because I know what to listen for, but I could have sworn I heard a “gargle” sound within the words.

The NewsworthyAudio focus group went on for a few hours and towards the end, the hardest part was to determine prices for different scenarios. Since Talkr already does something similar for free (or the first 3 feeds), I can’t see myself paying for something that someone else is already offering for free. On top of that, I didn’t user Talkr after a couple weeks of trying it out along with other podcasting services and utilities.

Personally, I have very bad reading comprehension. I’ll read through a paragraph a few times and I won’t know what I had just read. At other times, I can read just fine, but at a slow pace. Some may say that this kind of service is perfect for someone like me. I don’t know. My biggest complaint was that I would listen for gramical errors after the conversion messed up the first time.

They are also rewarding me with a few months of free service. Maybe it will grow on me. At the moment though, I am just not interested. So what did I get out of this beta test? Here is a quick inventory:

• 128 MB Rio Forge MP3 Player with FM tuner
• Belkin FM Transmitter
• $100 cash from Focus Group
• Free dinner
• 9 Months free service
• 2 additional AAA batteries

What did I put into it?

• 5 days of listening to audio on my commute: 7 hours
• Answering pretty extensive surveys each night: 6 hours
• Some input in the focus groups: 3 hours
• Troubleshooting synchronizing between my Rio Forge and iTunes: 2 hours
• Permitting audio and video recording of myself at the focus group

That focus group – I felt like I was just wanting to talk a few times, but so many people are more dominant in that area. It was hard to see a chance to say something. Most of us were in the IT industry, such as developers, network administrators, etc. You can imagine the can of worms you are opening when you get a lot of people like that together in a Focus group. Somehow everyone starts to form opinions and suggestions. It’s good, but you can get off topic easily. The moderator helped keep us on track though.

Now my Rio Forge sets here in the shadows of my iPod. It has no life, no purpose. The same goes for the Belken FM Transmitter. The Griffen Road Trip FM Transmitter is more compact, convienient, easier to use and estetically pleasing to the eye.

Tags: iPod, Free iPod, Newsworthy Audio, NewsworthyAudio, Newsworthy, Audio, News, Syndication, Syndic8, Focus Group, Free, Free Stuff, Beta, Beta Testing, Service, News Service, TShirt, T-Shirt

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 2:10 am and is filed under Entertainment, Finances, Hobbies, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.