The Inquisitr » pimpmynews

Listen To Blogs On-The-Go With Pimp My News iPhone App (Free Downloads Inside)

JR — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:32:38 +0000

You can now listen to the latest posts from your favorite blogs on-the-go, thanks to the newly launched Pimp My News iPhone app.

Pimp My News: The iPhone App

Pimp My News is an online service that converts stories from a wide variety of blogs into streamable and downloadable audio files. (See our original review here.) Now, with its iPhone app, the same service is available to carry around with you wherever you go.

Converted Content

The Pimp My News app functions much like the Web site: You select which blogs or news sites you want to keep up with, and the app will grab their content and convert it into audio. You can then listen to the stories at your convenience, either individually or within custom playlists.

The Inquisitr, by the way, is among the blogs featured within Pimp My News. Our tech feed is now in the site’s “Top Blogs” category, and the entertainment feed can be found within the “Entertainment” section.

Social Sharing

Pimp My News’s iPhone app also lets you share content with a single click, and without having to leave the application. It’s automatically connected to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Mixx.

Pricing and Free Downloads

The Pimp My News app works on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. It’s now available in the Apple App Store for $3.99. The service itself is completely free.

If you’re one of the first ~~five~~ 10 Inquisitr readers to respond, you can grab the app right now for free, too. E-mail membership [at] pimpmynews.com with “Inquisitr” in the subject line to get your free download code.

Update: The Inquisitr Now Available for Your Listening Pleasure

JR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:00:49 +0000

You can now listen to content from The Inquisitr on your computer, mobile phone, or MP3 player. The folks over at Pimp My News — which we reviewed Monday — have added us into their mix following our observation that we were missing from the offerings.

Pimp My News converts posts from thousands of blog and news sites into audio made available for Web streaming, cell phone streaming, or MP3 player downloads. The Inquisitr’s Tech section, Pop section, and Odd section now all have their own streams within the appropriate categories there.

CEO John Atkinson also tells us he and his team are working on resolving the two issues we mentioned in our original post — site speed and content turnaround time — and are preparing to roll out a slew of new features for the service as well.

On a side note, if you didn’t see our initial review of the service, you can now listen to it as well…it was among the first Inquisitr stories pulled into the site.

Pimp My News: Turning Blogs into Mobile Audio

JR — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:41:27 +0000

You can now catch up on your day’s Web reading with your eyes closed, thanks to a startup aptly named Pimp My News. The nine-month-old service converts thousands of blog and news sites’ content into audio files that can be played either via an online or mobile interface, or downloaded for use on an MP3 player.

A scan through the service’s available categories shows you the wide variety of content available. Almost any news/blog genre you can imagine is included somewhere. Within the technology tab, you’ll find everything from Apple news to gadget reviews, Internet blogs, social media discussions, and startup spotlights.

Most categories seem to have a fairly decent mix of material. Right now, for example, the “social media” tab leads off with Mashable’s morning story about the food service rumors within Google. Click onto the “top bloggers” tab and you’ll find audio of some recent Scoble posts at the top of the page.

The two downsides to the system are both time-related. First, turnaround time: Many of the top entries are several hours old and more recent postings have yet to appear. Still, the content that is present is easy to access and generally tolerable enough for listening. A male computer voice acts as the narrator and seems to be pretty accurate as far as pronunciations. Second, loading time: The service is a bit on the pokey side and a little slow to load, at least during the times at which we’ve accessed it.

The Inquisitr, incidentally, is not yet featured on Pimp My News. We’ve officially requested it, though — and the service makes it clear that it’s happy to make additions for anyone missing their favorite sites in the mix…so stay tuned. (Update: The Inquisitr is now featured.)

Pimp My News is free to use and ad-supported. The only real limitation is in building a personalized podcast or playlist: You are limited to 10 sources and a 10 minute daily program. In general use of the site, though — whether through the Web interface or the iPhone-optimized mobile interface — you are unrestricted in your activity.

Our vote: Great idea, great service. Being able to load up your MP3 player with reading — rather, listening — for the morning drive is a cool convenience. And the mobile accessibility makes any on-the-go catching up easy to do, particularly if you’re not stationary and are thus unable to sit down and read. We’ll be curious to see if Pimp My News looks into some type of “premium” pay service in the future or if the ad model will prove sufficient to support it. We also hope the turnaround time and site speed will improve as the service grows and develops. All combined, though, Pimp My News is an offering well-worth giving a whirl. We suspect you just may love it.