Best solution for reading blogs on the "walk"

[jbischke]

Hey all. One of my goals for 2007 is to get away from the computer more. It's tough nowadays since there is more compelling content than ever online and better filters in place. Still, if I'm behind the screen for more than a half-dozen hours a day I don't feel as creative or as fulfilled.

One thing that I'm planning to do is do more blog reading while exercising. Simply walking on a treadmill while reading blogs is a good way to kill two birds with one stone. I'm about due for a new phone and so I'm wondering what phones might be the best for doing this. I've heard good stuff about the Blackberry Pearl so that might be the way I go. I'm in LA and Verizon is generally thought to be best here but Cingular ain't bad and since Verizon isn't offering the Pearl yet that may be the way I go.

If anyone has any suggestions feel free to shoot 'em at me.

[StevenA]

That sounds like a great goal! I feel exactly the same way about doing anything for that length of time. Doing things in moderation is a definite boost to my creativity. I always found phone/PDA browsing to be a total pain, but that was a couple years ago so I'm sure the technology is ahead quite a bit. Still, I would recommend queueing printing out things you'd like to read. There's something about reading things on paper that causes me to be more absorbed. Good luck.

[jbischke]

For me at least printing things seems more expensive and has a more negative impact environmentally. A buddy of mine has the Pearl and was raving about it's web-browsing capabilities. This might be a good option. I read all my blogs through Bloglines and their mobile reader is pretty good. This is definitely something that I'm going to look into because I probably spend 30-60 minutes a day reading blogs and to be able to get in a mini-workout while I do this would be pretty cool.

[Radek Pilich]

I would prefere to use some kind of speech synthesis software to convert blog entries and articles to speech mp3s and then listen to them through my mp3 player. I would appreciate if anybody has anything to say regarding to this topic to make a post here or send me a private message.

[tobyhede]

You could move onto podcasts ... there's a lot of great content being produced into MP3s ... load them onto a player and walk away.

[Gene]

Originally Posted by jbischke

One thing that I'm planning to do is do more blog reading while exercising. Simply walking on a treadmill while reading blogs is a good way to kill two birds with one stone.

If anyone has any suggestions feel free to shoot 'em at me.

I use a text to speech program called text aloud to make audio files out of some material, especially longer stuff and listen to it instead of reading the material.

It works for me.

[jthayes]

Sounds interesting. I'll have to check this one out.

I spend about 3 hours a day commuting to and from work. I'd love to find something to convert bogs into mp3's for my ipod.

Thanks for the tip, I'll let you know what I think.

[SamBeaven]

I use the text-to-speech capabilities built into my mac to do this. Great fun.

[da1prophet]

I use Bloglines to aggregate the various blogs I follow...then I read them on my Palm Treo 650. The Blackberry Pearl is a cool device, but there's any number of wired PDA's that will do just as well for blog reading.