PimpMyNews is a relatively new site (launched in December), that allows news and blogs to be read aloud via either their site or downloadable podcast. While this can be fairly useful in certain situations while sitting on a computer (listening to one of my posts helped me catch a typo), it really shines as a podcast creator and an iPhone app (which the company just launched at MacWorld).

To create a podcast, you must first create an account on the site. From here you’ll be walked through selecting sites which you’d like to add to your ‘playlist’ from the feeds they offer (they were nice enough to include ParisLemon in the “Top Bloggers and Gurus” category). You can then drill down into these and pick which you would like delivered to you everyday read aloud (in a computer voice) as a podcast – they even make it very simple to subscribe to this new podcast in iTunes.

While that is pretty neat, the iPhone app is arguably better. Directing your iPhone to http://www.pimpmynews.com/m takes you to a built-for-iPhone version of the site where you can take your pick from select top news stories and also top blog stories to hear read to you through your headphones (or the iPhone’s built in speakers). While the computer-voice pronunciation isn’t perfect, it is substantially better than I remember it being when I last used a text-to-speech reader.

Utilizing this version, there is no need to even download a podcast version of the sites you want to listen to. You simply can click the ‘Play!’ button and it will start playing an .mp3 version of the story.

The company just launched the ability to access your personalized playlists from the iPhone app as well, making it extremely simple to be able to listen to your favorite sites on the go where you might be doing something that prohibits you from reading them.

The iPhone version of the site also has a nice JavaScript-powered summary area incase you aren’t sure if you want to load an entire new page on the actual site to read the article – and allows you to submit to any of the popular social bookmarking sites from here. The app was featured on Apple’s Web Apps page.

In an interview with Forbes, PimpMyNews CEO John Atkinson mentions how excited he is to get his hands on Apple’s iPhone SDK so they can start doing some really cool integration and hopefully speed things up a bit.

People are always asking me for some good iPhone app recommendations, and this would certainly be one to check out. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the SDK.