Blog Car Radio: Minimal attention interface based on ranking of local blog entries

The media content presented to a vehicle driver is mainly auditory, since visual content is distracting and viewing it increases the risk of an accident. Music and radio are thus commonly listened to while driving. However, these types of content rarely reflect regional characteristics and are therefore not well suited for tourists who want to get information about the region they are visiting. We have developed the Blog Car Radio system that presents blog entries in auditory style using sonification (speech synthesis). Blog entries are obtained from blog search engines, selected by distances from the vehicle’s current location, and ranked based on their suitability for sonification and relevance to the userspecified category. By using Blog Car Radio, a driver can obtain local information with only a small amount of distraction. In this paper, we particularly discussed the method to rank text contents which is suitable for sonification.