Blog feeds turned into personalized TV show

Guide enables blog readers to turn content into a personalized television news-style video channel.

We’ve seen social media sites and news-delivering organizations increasingly converge over the last couple of years, and a number of innovations have sprung up to reflect this. One example is the Little Printer, which prints out social media updates and current affairs stories in the form of a newspaper. Now, Guide is a platform that enables blog readers to turn the content into a personalized television news-style video channel. Users signing up to Guide can load feeds ranging from social networks to blogs onto their personal account. They are also prompted to select a presenter – a digital ‘news anchor’ that uses text-to-speech software to read aloud content from the feeds – that can take the form of a human, robot, anime character, dog or cat. The multimedia content in each article or post is then reformatted to fit the news program style, with headlines displayed as text on the screen, body content spoken by the anchor and videos played at the same point they are inserted into the post. A ‘TV guide’ shows which stories are upcoming on different feed channels and users can immediately skip to those they’re interested in. The following video gives a demonstration of the service: Guide successfully reconfigures online content to make it more visual and less demanding of one’s attention, so that web users can keep up with their social networks and favorite blogs while getting on with other tasks. Are there other ways online data can be made more personalized and easily digestible? Spotted by: Murray Orange