There’s a new episode of

There’s a new episode of 0sil8 called Press Nothing to Continue. Basically, it’s a weblog (powered by Blogger) read over the phone. Blogger outputs a VXML (Voice XML) file which is then scraped by Tellme Networks when someone calls the 0sil8 extension. The Tellme system then reads the text of the VXML file over the phone via a text-to-speech translator. The contributors have been posting some good stuff; it’s worth a listen (US and Canada only, although folks from other areas can use those newfangled Net telephones like Dialpad and Net2Phone to make free 800 calls to the US).

The stuff that Tellme is doing is pretty impressive. They’ve taken something which is fairly easy and inexpensive to do (Web development) and used it to do something that has traditionally been difficult and expensive (building custom telephone applications). The Web-to-phone integration is pretty cool, but allowing small companies to build inexpensive, non-proprietary, telephone applications with their existing Web development staff and infrastructure is where Tellme is going to make their money.