MobileBeat: BlogRadio lets you listen to blog RSS feeds

BlogRadio is one of 20 promising startups included in the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition, and is in the running for one of two coveted Tesla Awards.

BlogRadio has come up with an interesting solution for RSS overload: The service lets you listen to any blog RSS feed with its natural text-to-speech technology.

The service works as you’d expect from the description above: You supply it with an RSS feed, and it spits out a streaming audio version of the text in English or Spanish with a selection of five voices. Basically, it’s akin to making podcasts out of favorite blogs — except they can only be streamed from BlogRadio, and not downloaded for offline use.

It’s available for desktop platforms (Windows, Mac, and even Linux), as well as mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, and soon Nokia. For a content-focused service like BlogRadio, its mobile component has the potential to become a killer feature. It’s also something that BlogBird, one of the company’s competitors, doesn’t yet offer.

BlogRadio boasts unlimited listening time for users. Eventually, it plans to move towards a “freemium” model that will continue to grant users free access to the service with the addition of ads. It will eventually offer a premium version for a nominal fee that removes ads and provides other special features.

The El Cajon, Calif.-based startup was one of the winners of Adobe and Nokia’s Open Screen Project, which landed it an unspecified amount of seed funding.