So this recent episode from The Onion Radio News reduced me to helpless giggles. Enjoy!

UPDATE: On a related note, science journalist Christie Aschwanden alerted me to this 2008 NYT story: Experts Question Placebo Pill for Children. Thanks! Brilliant! You just can’t make this shit up!

See: Three generational gadget trends for news orgs to watch

The trends & implications I saw are:

1. Picture-taking is the most popular non-voice cell activity, even more than texting! So why not do more with community-contributed pictures?
2. Tablets are still a niche market. Right now, there are much bigger mobile fish to fry in terms of potential market size. Consider where your business interest really lie.
3. MP3 players are especially popular with young adults, so consider doing more with podcasts and other audio content.

I discuss the details more over at my article on KDMC.

They’re using ScribbleLive, a modular-oriented content management tool that “plays nice” with content from a variety of sources — social media, MMSed-in photos, blog posts, and — as shown — phoned-in audio updates from Egypt.

See Al Jazeera English, Live Messages from Egypt.

I’ve covered ScribbleLive before. I think it’s a great tool, and I’d like to see more tools like it for venues that cover breaking news. Another good option is Burt Herman’s Storify project.

‘The Social Strip’ – Nic Adler on Social Media for Community Development

I just listened to today’s episode, Future Sci-Fi, which is about the intersection of science and science fiction — how they’ve influenced each other. I’ve heard most of these anecdotes before, but nice to have them pulled together into a well-crafted narrative.

Worth a listen.

Give these a listen and you’ll see what I mean:

• Tech Nation interview with Bill Bryson, author of At Home: A Short History of Private Life.
• Radio Lab: What does technology want? “In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series LIVE from the NYPL, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.”

I’ve made a discovery about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader: It’s a pretty good “news radio.” That is, its text-to-speech function does a surprisingly decent job of reading news content aloud.

I currently subscribe to the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle, and I’ve gotten in the habit of letting it read me some interesting articles as I go through my morning routine. I like it. The automated text-to-speech reader is a bit flat for fiction, narrative, and essays that require significant emotional or rhetorical inflection — but it’s great for news. I’ve starting considering it my “robotic NPR.”

(Ducking the reflexive outcry from all my friends at NPR…)

Of course, my point isn’t only about the Kindle. It’s about how any text-to-speech service or tool can interact with text-based news and information content — and why creators of text-based news content should start to take that into consideration. Because you never know exactly how people will experience your content…

Like e-reader display technology, text-to-speech technology has improved significantly in the last few years. It’s still far from perfect, but of all the versions I’ve heard the Kindle’s is one of the clearest, and others are catching up. This is good for people who have a preference for audio news, because now we can experience news produced for text in a format that works with our preferences.

Don’t get me wrong — I love news specifically produced for audio (either radio broadcast or audio/video news podcast). I listen to a lot of it. (Oh, if you haven’t tried the Public Radio Tuner iPhone application, get it, it’s killer.)

Still… It’s pretty cool to be able to have stories from WSJ.com read aloud to me while I cook my veggie pesto omelet. Or articles from the newly online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which I can quickly “Kindlfy” via the free Instapaper service, which I wrote about earlier.

As text-to-speech technology continues to improve and proliferate, I’d suggest that text news publishers consider how well their online and Kindle content “reads,” in the audible sense. One thing I don’t like about listening to WSJ stories via Kindle is that it reads aloud all the navigational context at the top of the story: word count, etc. This is just a minor and fast irritation, but it bugs me. There’s got to be a way to get around that.

So, as I recommended when I first wrote about the Kindle 2, when your newsroom gets its Kindle (or when you get to fondle someone else’s for a bit), try listening to some news stories (preferably your own, but anyone’s news is a good start). You can subscribe to many newspapers and magazines via the Kindle store for a free two-week trial, or buy an individual article or two. Play with the settings for speed, gender of voice, etc. Realize that you’re listening to a stepping stone technology that presages a potentially important channel for your news in the future. And just keep it in mind.

(Note: This is a slightly re-edited version of an article I originally published in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)