Your news and blogs are speaking to you, listen in with PimpMyNews

PimpMyNews is a new, free service that allows users with web browsers or MP3 players to listen to news and blogs instead of having to read them. This is accomplished with automatic text-to-speech conversion and played back with Quicktime enabling the service to work nicely on the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s like magic. You can customize your playlist from thousands of news and blog publishers. You can even share stories and playlists with friends, and rate stories in the community. PimpMyNews is ideal for productivity junkies who can satisfy their news and blog cravings while doing other things.

iPhone or iPod touch users need to sign up for a free account from your computer first. You will also need to confirm your account from your computer by clicking on the link sent to your email. After you confirm, you’re free to roam about the cabin using your iPhone or iPod touch.

Once you get started with PimpMyNews, you will have the option to create a custom playlist of news and blogs. You can add up to ten of your favorite news or blog sources (rss feeds) to your playlist. These can be added by browsing through a database of supported sources, or by using a FastPak which is a collection of feeds already bundled for you by topic and interest. If you want to listen to your playlist on your MP3 player you will also have an option to include your playlist in your daily podcast. iPhone and iPod touch user don’t have to mess with that option unless you have an additional MP3 player you will also be using to listen to your news and blogs.

On the iPhone or iPod touch, your playlist will display as a list of headlines from all of your custom sources. You can filter these to show only the headlines from a specific source. Beneath each headline are options that allow you to tap and listen to the story (text-to-speech), read either the summary or entire story in your web browser, or email the story to a friend.

The creators claim to be using proprietary software along with the latest text-to-speech technology to produce near-human sounding audio. The speaking voice used by PimpMyNews is one of those computer generated voices, but we’re not talking about Bubbles or Zarvox here. No, this voice sounds surprisingly natural and has a speaking cadence that you can listen to for a long time without getting annoyed.

Sign up for your free account then point your iPhone or iPod touch to pimpmynews.com/m.

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