An Unusual Twitter Related Service That Turn Tweets Into a Radio Show

The kinds of Twitter-related services that individuals and companies are limited only by the imagination. One of the more unusual ones is provided by Tweetrad.io, a which converts Twitter posts into a kind of radio broadcast. The service ads extras like simulated static between between posts to make it sound like you are changing stations with an old style radio tuning knob.

It isn't a word-for-word translation. URLs are excluded and common Twitter terms get turned into appropriate phrases. The result is somewhat mechanical, and for most not not hard to understand.

While this kind of service can have practical uses, the creators of it may have been looking to develop something that was more entertainment related than business related. You can get a bit of an idea of the attitude of the folks at tweetrad.io by reading what they say about their company.

At tweetrad.io our mission is to index all the world's information; however, unlike google we plan to be really evil in the process. We've started by seeking out the most relevant scholarly data on the web. Naturally Twitter was where we looked first. Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we've made it possible for billions of people to hear the "Pulse of the Planet" as never before.

Rather than describe this service, I invite you to check it out for yourself.

Text to Speech Functions as a Podcasting Tool

Text to speech software has been evolving for decades, though there has been substantial progress in recent years. For those of you who have purchased a Mac computer in recent years, the compute comes with a text to speech system that can be used to read text.

I've run a podcast for several years at my airline safety site AirSafe.com, and last week I decided to run a test to see how well the audience would accept a computer voice instead of a human narrator. I combined that with the online form I talked about in the last post to do two things: try out the text to speech software as a narrator and evaluate the audience's reaction to it.

Early results show that the podcast, which was just under five minutes long and was about two airline safety incidents from late October 2009, was generally well received. Most of those who responded listened to the entire podcast, and also felt that they could stand to hear the voice for short episodes. Surprisingly, most said they would listen to shows of any length.

One of the options for this text to speech system is to supplement regular interviews. There are dozens of comments and emails that come in during the typical month, and some would be appropriate for some podcasts. Also, those who wanted to submit guest commentaries but who did not have recording capability could write their response, and the software could read it.

For the AirSafe.com aviation safety podcasts, the ultimate goal of using text to speech software isn't to avoid recording regular voice conversations, but to provide a way for the portions of the audience without podcasting equipment to contribute to the ongoing conversation.

Listen to the Podcast Episode
Northwest Airlines A320 Overflight Event and the Delta 767 Landing Incident

Easy to Use Encoder That Allows You to Properly Format Source Code For Inclusion in a Web Site or Blog

Sometimes using the right search terms can uncover the right tool at the right time. The other day, I was writing a post for another blog and I needed to put raw source code in the post. Blogger will try to execute the code no matter what kind of formatting tags I put around it. I wanted readers to be able to easily copy and paste the code, so making it into a graphic wasn't a good choice.

After about 30 seconds searching for an answer of how to put raw code into a blog without it getting executed, I ran into an online converter that did the job for me. It did things that would have been very time consuming if I had to do it by hand, things like changing '<' to '<. and similar conversions for '>', '&', and '"'.

Resources
For this and other links to search engine optimization and web site development tools, visit AirSafe Media's Delicious links at delicious.com/airsafe.

Drug Companies Have Sharp Reduction in Text Link Advertising

According to an October 1st media release by the online marketing company comScore, one of their recent studies showed a significant change in search engine marketing by the pharmaceutical industry, specifically a greater than 50% drop in the use of sponsored links for related terms like prescription drug treatment, as a result warning letters distributed by the US Food and Drug Administration in March 2009. The FDA warning letters were issued to pharmaceutical manufacturers concerning the exclusion of fair balance language in sponsored link advertising.

According to comScore, there were 11.9 million sponsored link exposures in March 2009, but only 3.2 million the following month, dropping to 1.9 million in June 2009.

AirSafe Media encourage any site owner who chooses to accept advertising to do so wisely. You can find AirSafe Media's general guidelines for advertising in the February 2009 post "Choosing and Rejecting Text Link Advertising Offers."

Advertising Rules and Search Engines

Much has been written about the rules that Google and others have when it comes to advertising. The fear of many web site managers is that any paid advertising on their site will have dire consequences when it comes to their search engine rank or their Google PageRank value. While I have no idea what the exact rules are for the algorithms behind the search engines, what I do know is that the policies of Google, the biggest player in the search engine world, seem to allow many types of advertising.

Recently, while reviewing the polices of their Google AdSense policies, one paragraph about competitive advertising and services states that "In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads."

There continues to be a fear among many web site owners that Google and others will punish sites for any kind of advertising, or that a "nofollow" attribute would have to placed in any kind of text link ad. I have yet to find any policy statement within Google's AdWords or AdSense that states this, though the belief that such a policy exists is widespread among site owners and managers.

There are cases where Google and others may punish a site, and I agree with sanctions in some cases. For example, if a site is clearly designed to game the system by artificially getting a high search engine rank and the site's content consists mostly of paid text links, then having the site ignored by search engines is in my opinion in the best interest of the consumer.

This doesn't mean that companies like Google that make their money in part from advertising enjoys competition. My interpretation of Google's policies, based in part on having conversations with Google representatives at industry meetings, is that although they would like to discourage links that exist mostly for the purpose of enhancing a site's PageRank value, and that there may be sanctions for sites that have a large number of these kinds of links, that they are not interested in punishing every site that has text link advertising.

The fear for many site owners is that they could be playing fair and seemingly within Google's rules and still get punished by having their PageRank reduced or having a drop in their search engine results, and to have these things to happen without notice or chance of appeal. This is a scenario I worry about on occasion. I currently manage about a dozen sites and blogs, and I also place significant content in places like YouTube and Facebook, This content is often closely related, and at any given time I may have dozens of relevant links connecting blog articles, web pages, online videos, and other resources. While a person looking at this collection of sites may be able to easily see a relationship, a search engine algorithm may evaluate designed to look for and punish paid link type relationships may not be able to do so.

My argument is that search engine companies are free to do what they wish when it comes to their search engines and related tools, and I think they should sanction activities that clearly undermine their usefulness of the search engine. While search engine companies may want to discourage advertising that they don't control, punishing sites isn't in their best interest and will likely not be an issue for most sites.

The following example may make it plain. If a set of sites for a particular subject area were consistently in the top ten results the major search engines and drew substantial traffic, it wouldn't be surprising that advertisers would want to work with those sites. If one one search engine decided to punish all sites with advertising, then the ten best sites on a subject, which happen to attract lots of advertising, would suddenly not be at the top of that search engines results for that subject area. The competing search engines that don't punish these sites would still have the best sites on the top of their results, which would provide their users with a better search experience.

If an search engine were truly putting sanctions on all sites that advertise, it would be pretty obvious once the top sites were no longer in the top results. In the past several yeas, I have not seen any pattern that suggests that this has been happening for Google or for the other top search engines.

I'll make no predictions about the future advertising policies of Google or any other search engine, but based on my experience, I believe sites that use dishonest or misleading advertising will be punished, but sites that use honest advertising that provides value to the site's visitors and that doesn't try to manipulate search engines will be treated fairly.