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How often do you look at your RSS feeds and groan to realize that you’ve got 300 unread posts to scroll through?  Don’t you sometimes wish that you could passively listen to those text feeds - say, in your car, as if each blog post was a podcast?

Now you can.  The name of this new service is kind of goofy – PimpMyNews – but the concept is cool.  PMN automatically converts the blog posts of your choice to an audio format that you can listen to online, or, on-the-go via your iPod, iPhone or any MP3 player.  You can listen to your personal blog faves or choose from any number of the 3,000+ news stories and blog posts that are added to the PMN site daily.  You can even listen to PR-Squared!

The only real downside to the service is that the Text-To-Speech, while pretty darned good as far as these TTS apps go, is still pretty robotic, a la Stephen Hawking.  You can lose some of the nuance of a post because you wind up focused on an off-the-mark pronunciation or by the alien tone of voice. 

Then again, Stephen Hawking is pretty freakin’ brilliant, eh?  If you met him in-person, you’d probably make the effort to comprehend him.

PMN founder, John Atkinson, is counting on that kind of commitment.  In a recent conversation he noted that most PMN beta testers got used to the “robot voice” within 10 minutes or so.  He likened it to meeting someone with a thick foreign accent: at first you despair of understanding them, but with time your ears train themselves to the person’s speech patterns, and comprehension grows.

Sounds like somebody’s listening.  Since PMN’s early December launch, users from 87 different countries have stopped by to check it out, and it was recently named Cool Site of the Day.