Just an idea I had while listening to a recent story from This I Believe. It was a recent story from a prisoner in Michigan. The essay was recorded by phone, since they don’t allow recording equipment inside the jail. This got me thinking about a few blogs I’ve seen run by friends or family of inmates, who post letters they get from prisoners online. Its basically blogging by proxy.
But most prisoners don’t have someone who can do this for them. What if we could set up a site that nearly completely automated the process? OCR is at a point where it would be trivial to scan a letter and post it online. Or it could even be possible to set up a phone number that prisoners could call and their message could be converted to a text post. It seems pretty feasible, and I’d imagine it would be incredibly interesting, so I’m going to keep this idea stewing until I found out what the best way to do this would be.