Jaws at the end of a phoneline
The smart chaps over at connectmeanywhere.com have just expanded the reach of blogs to anyone, anywhere, anytime regardless of ability or location. Isn’t that what our own Paul Walsh calls ‘the Web on the move’?!Their new product Call A Feed allows you to listen to headlines, stories and updates from Web sites and blogs.
For the price of a local call you can now dial into your favourite blog/site, select a desired post/update and listen while on the go, be it shopping, in the car, jogging or even power walking to your next meeting. No download or installation required, in fact, you don’t even need a pc 
The whole experience is *really* easy to follow. Try it by calling 02070431197 and listen to Segala’s blog feed.
The call starts with a short welcome and presents you with a list of options. The options are the post titles followed by a number, which you select to listen to the specific post. It’s a very straight forward menu that uses general keys on any normal handset. One of the coolest features of the new product is the ability to pause, rewind, stop and fast forward the actual details of the post by hitting # to fast forward, * to rewind, 8 to stop, 0 to pause and 7 to restart.
The above number is dedicated to the Segala blog 100%. Connectmeanywhere.com have various packages available which suits everyone’s needs from small blogs to large international corporates. Call A Feed is currently in Beta and you can try it free by registering here.
What would be really cool is the ability to access a directory of favourite sites via one number. I’m sure that’s on the radar.
From an accessibility and usability perspective this is one sure way of improving the accessibility of your own blog or Web site. It is one of those cool bolt-ons that you think you may never use. Where as one day you might refer someone to a post in the middle of the street or during a networking event, how cool would it be not only to provide a URI but also a number and say “Sure why wait, give it a call”. It’s like having Jaws at the end of your phone line
By the way, JAWS is one of the most widely used software applications by blind people to access the Web.
5 Responses to “Jaws at the end of a phoneline”
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“What would be really cool is the ability to access a directory of favourite sites via one number. I’m sure that’s on the radar.”
Actually you can do that, you can register and add as many as you like and navigate them using a normal phone keypad. You can add rss_feeds, groups of contacts or people to phone. Register and check it out for yourself. Access the world from one local number.
Ryan.
OK wise guy, how about implementing voice recognition so users can comment on blogs using mobiles?
We feel it is better to leave the comment as a voice recording (which is in the pipeline) rather than converting the text to speech which is pretty unreliable even in ideal conditions . Stay tuned.
Ryan.
Ryan – even that’s pretty cool. I bet my dear friend Ken Blakeslee could help with the text to speech element
Ken?
I’ve seen some others trying 2 do this as well and also seen VR 4 text relays etc.. The VR side isn’t that hard ‘once its trained”
Lal