Naked Conversations / TechCrunch Party

I’ll be at the Naked Conversations Party tonight (hosted by Michael Arrington at his house). It should be a blast!

Shel and Robert really did a great job on the book. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to blogging, so I was surprised to find so many examples in the book that were new to me. And the examples I was familiar with were given strong, in-depth treatment, showing me the rest of the story. I finished it last night, so I plan to put together a review this weekend.

At home, I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down, so I read half of the hardcover and had Microsoft Mary read the other half to me (using the Digital Edition). I used my laptop (booted to XP) and Adobe’s PDF Reader (with DRM) [Menu->View->Read Out Loud or CTRL-SHIFT-B]. Microsoft Mary is from the Microsoft Speech SDK. There were a few quirks (Read Out Loud doesn’t skip over urls in the footnotes and it mispronounces ‘Scoble’), but it was a pretty positive experience for my first time using text to speech so extensively.