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Did you just listen to something so funny/awesome/interesting/weird that you just must pass it on to a friend or remember it for later?! Have no fear- sharing and bookmarking for Jott Feeds is now here!

Here’s how it works:

1. Call Jott and say “Jott Feeds”, then the name of the feed you’d like to listen to.
2. At anytime while listening to something you’d like to bookmark for yourself or share, press 9 on your phone’s keypad.
3. You’ll be asked “Who would you like to share this with”, reply with anyone in your contact list or a group you created to share it, or bookmark it for yourself by replying with “Myself”.
4. The end result is an email that comes from you, that has the headline and the first line of the article/post, as well as a link to full text.

I am particularly excited about this feature, as it now aides  what my friend likes to call  my “article email obsession”. This is where I feel the need to send any and all interesting articles I read to people I think might enjoy them. I hope a few of you catch the fever too- in my humble opinion, there are few things better than sharing what you just learned.

You may remember a little while back we told you about the Big Business competition going on over at Allbusiness.com. The other day they announced the semi-finalists. Congratulations to all!

• Gabrielle Desantis – Gigi Hill LLC, Yorba Linda, CA
• Mark Harris – TriathlonDVD Productions, Inc., Nashville, TN
• Mike Klausen – Yellow Group, Inc., Cape Coral, FL
• John Sullivan – WellMasters, Lakeland, FL
• Philippa Kennealy – The Entrepreneurial MD, Los Angeles, CA
• Jennifer Lyle – Software Testing Solutions LLC, Tucson, AZ
• John Sanders – Premier Christian Cruises, Inc., Memphis, TN
• Christopher Sands – WebRoyal, Wellington, FL
• Dana Smith - Exalt Resources LLC, Lakewood, CA
• Judi Townsend - Mannequin Madness, Inc., Oakland, CA
• Helena Vanderwey - The Trading Company, Inc., Woodburn, OR
• David Voss - Voss & Associates, Sarasota, FL
• Susan Wilson - The Judgment Group, Stevensville, MD
• Al Orloff - Voyager Components, Inc., Silverton, OR 

It’s certainly not easy to clearly articulate what you are doing and what you want others to know in just one or two sentences. After all, we are used to the world of email where you are free to use verbose language without any restrictions. That’s why I was so happy to come across an interesting post on Lifehack, giving suggestions on how to write messages in 140 characters. It’s a must read for those of you who love to Tweet and those who like to text (and especially good for when you send text messages via Jott).

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and as a result have implemented a new text messaging template. What does this mean? It means that when you use Jott to send a text message to one of your contacts, we no longer include all sorts of extra text about Jott. Instead, we send only the information needed to allow you to communicate w/ your friends.

Here’s what a text message to your contacts will look like…

Jott from John Doe, 12386753209
To hear, call <xxxxxxx>
Msg: [Your transcribed message will go here]

For security reasons, we are not able to send text messages that appear to come from your phone number. So, all Jott text messages to your contacts come from the Jott short code 40101. As a result, we need a way to make sure your contacts know that the message is from you and have a way to reply to you – we do this by having the first line of your text message say “Jott from <your name>, <your phone number>”.

Also, in case your voice message is not converted to text with 100% accuracy (due to background noise, a bad cell connection, whatever – see blog post about better transcriptions) we wanted to include a way for your contact to listen to your message. To do this we included this message “To hear, call <xxxxxxx>”.

Hopefully that helps clear up any confusion for you and your contacts. Let us know what you think!

Monday: The dev team burned the midnight oil (and kicked some butt!) to get Jott Feeds ready to go.

Tuesday: We released Jott Feeds!

Wednesday: Started seeing some sites adding Jott Feeds badges and added  Seth Godin as a featured feed!

Thursday: David Pogue reviewed Jott in the New York Times! Check out the video too.

Friday: We’re still enjoying all this week’s excitement and looking forward to seeing Alicia’s band The Delusions play tonight at The Comet.

Today we are happy to announce a new addition to our mobile suite of features… Jott Feeds!

What the heck is it? Well, it’s a simple way of keeping up-to-date with your favorite blogs, Twitter and Facebook when you’re not at your computer… just by listening to them. Jott Feeds is like having a combination personal assistant and your very own news radio station… that you can control as easily as an iPod.

How do I start listening to feeds?

1) Call 866-JOTT-123, or your local Canadian number

2) When asked “Who do you want to Jott?” say “Jott Feeds”

3) When asked “Which feed?” reply with TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Mashable, SmartMoney, News or Weather (all of which have been added to your account already so you can give this a try right away).

4) Listen!

You can add lots of different blogs and sites to your account so you can listen to them. We created a library of sorts, so you can add commonly read sites, and set it up so you can easily enter your Twitter or Facebook information to get those updates too. Finally, we made it really easy to skip forward or go back in Jott Feeds using your phone’s keypad.

So now when you hop in the car on the way to work, put on that Bluetooth headset and have your stock quotes, Twitter updates, and news headlines all read to you. It’s a little bit like a radio station designed just for you.

How does it work?
We take the RSS feed from blogs and sites, convert it into audio using text-to-speech technology and send that audio to your phone.

Not sure what that means?
Have no fear, you’re not alone, and you actually don’t need to learn this new vocabulary to get the full effect of the feature, since we added all of this for you. But in case you’re curious… RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a feed is a constantly updated list, and RSS feeds really do mean just that- a constantly updated list of all your syndicated news sources.

What that means for you and me, is that RSS is an easy (they weren’t lying about the simple part) way to get updates from your favorite websites and new sources and Jott Feeds makes this simple even when away from your computer. Some feeds sound better than others of course, so feel free to experiment, and let us know what you think.

Add your own RSS
There are millions of different RSS feeds that are important to people, and we can’t list them all. So if there’s a feed you’d like to listen to that we don’t have listed as a Featured Feed, add your own feed by cutting and pasting the feed URL into your Jott account.

Women Entrepreneur posted Escaping E-mail Overload this week, taking a look at some ways of managing the onslaught of emails commonly awaiting all of us in our inboxes. This gets interesting when Mark Hurst from Bit Literacy challenges Tim Ferris’s 4 Hour Work Week and David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Ferris rebuked with some interesting points on his blog. Much to his credit, he raises the point that often these systems work in conjunction with each other, helping different people at different parts of their productivity journey. All of this has got me thinking about just how personal organization and productivity systems are. No two file cabinets are alike.

So where in the world of all this do you lie? Are you a Bit Literacy champ, do you only work 4 hours a week, or do you prefer to get things done with lists? No matter the answer, we sure do hope Jott helps with it all (I’m sorry… I just couldn’t resist!)

This week in blog posts by Jotters…

Literary Fangirl wrote: Writers’ Tool: Jott

Photo Steam Shovel wrote: Holy Crap It Worked! Jott/Blogger/Facebook/- web 2.0 at it’s finest!

DetroIT Speed wrote: Jott-reminders on the run

Crafted Webm@ster wrote: Blogging with Jott

Smart People I Know wrote: Want to learn more web 2.0 applications? Ask Jott!

Mad Mortgage World wrote: Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

10,000 Words wrote: 12 Useful online tools for journalists

Crafted Webm@ster wrote: Adventures in Twittering

Did you know that you can record your name in the Jott system? This will play when someone calls to send you a Jott message and we ask them to confirm who it’s going to. Just call 866-JOTT-123, or your local Canadian number, and say “Name” when asked “Who do you want to Jott?”. Record your name as however you’d like it read back to people. That’s it! The next time someone wants to send you a Jott message, and our system asks them to confirm where it’s going, they’ll hear you say your name!