Software to Speed Content Publishing
by
Brett Bumeter
When I first got into blogging a few years back, I had this idealistic notion that I might be able to save every great idea or insight that I had ever created.
I could save these gems for posterity or that odd ball Google Searcher that just happened to need the answer to something that I had found years earlier. Those long tail trickles of viewers or readers might along the way happen to click on my Google ad and my long tail would create a fat bank account.
Well all that idealism was pretty much just that, idealism. My long tail has never become long enough nor fat enough to correlate into a fat bank account. However, I still like to harvest gems from my past and publish them online where they might still someday be useful.
Back before I started publishing online, I used this great software for a project I was working on. We had some old reports from a database that was long dead and moth balled. They were on paper, and we needed the data fast.
We had the option of hiring temps to hand type them in or run them through a scanner with an optical character reader so that we could ultimately push the data into excel and a new database.
I mention that little story, because I’m getting ready to buy that software (now in version 16, back then in version 6 or 7) so that I can scan a large amount of content that I have on paper so that I can get it efficiently published.
Up until now, I have been reading it with Dragon Naturally Speaking which enables me to essentially type at 150 words a minute. That’s not quite double my own physical typing capability. Its good, but not as good as dropping a batch of papers onto a feeder tray, hitting start and letting my computer scan and read those documents over night while I’m sleeping!
The program is called OmniPage 16 and its one of the industry leaders in Optical Character Recognition a technology that is an old friend of mine from my days working in the Postal Service where we had excellent optical character readers that could read twice as many characters ever 3-6 months.
As with any technology, I still need to ponder when and where the best situations to use this tool might be, but the company is offering me a price I can’t refuse, so I won’t! I may not waste my time scanning travel guides and junk mail, but I’m sure that I will get some benefit out of the tool.
It even has the ability to take a picture from a camera of writing and convert it to computer text! Can you say “White Board”? 
