Over the last few months, I’ve become a fan and supporter of NPR, a not-for-profit organization in America dedicated to the production and distribution of “noncommercial news, talk and entertainment programming”, distributed nationally via public radio member stations.  This came about because typical news sources in America are increasingly focused in advertising dollars rather than informing their audience, and cater more to sensationalism and faux-news than unfiltered, unbiased news – I have no interest in supporting the “infotainment”-ization of CNN.

The problem with NPR, I discovered, is that they have wonderful daily programming that spans a range of interests and topics (read: NPR is not talk radio, but actually closer to a real-time History Channel on the radio) and that the programs can be up to two hours in length.  This becomes a problem when:

1. you’re a busy person
2. you don’t have a portable radio
3. you don’t spend a significant and consistent amount of time in the car

But imagine my surprise this week when I discovered that NPR offers podcasts of almost all of their shows, free of charge, that are easily integrated with iTunes – self-updating news and entertainment programs that automatically transfer to your iPod according to rules you create.

This discovery was wonderful – now I could listen to what I wanted on a regular basis without being dependent on the car’s radio!  NPR’s Talk of the Nation and Marketplace (via American Public Media), along with assorted programs from the BBC’s World Service suite and PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, have now become a daily staple for my travels.  Sadly, though, All Things Considered does not have a subscription process, and a query to NPR has been submitted.

Although the podcast process is a great modern innovation for on-demand quality programming, and the television industry would do well to take note, there remains a problem:  if a podcast is started on an iPod, but not finished, the only way to continue later is to either not listen to anything else or memorize its time position.

So, Apple, here’s a two-fold feature request:

1. have a default option to remember the listening position of podcasts, and allow it to be restarted where the user left off – similar to a DVD player’s “resume stop” feature, except with persistent memory during other content.
2. have “intelligent listening transference” from an iPod to a computer’s installation of iTunes, allowing a user to start the podcast on their iPod and finish listening in iTunes.

These two small, but important, new features would make the iTunes method of podcast delivery quite possibly the default distribution method for future “radio” shows and other audio-based programming.  But for a media revolution to be successful, the tools in use must first attain a level of usability, in combination with appropriate market/social timing:  FM radio and cable television saw this in previous decades, and the “blogging revolution” is currently experiencing this as tools mature and newspapers fail.

NPR, I love you, but Apple could take our relationship to the next level – why don’t you give them a ring?

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Update (8/27/2009 11:50am PST): Word is coming in that most iPods already do this.  Mine doesn’t, but possibly because it’s too old.  So if this was a new idea to you, try it out – it probably already works for you!

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction.  He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

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The player is free and can be customized by color and size to match any web page or blog as well as to propagate shows in Facebook, MySpace and twenty other sites such as iGoogle and Wordpress using Gigya’s Wildfire widget distribution technology. Users can visually fly back and forth between album art for each show in the widget by controlling “show flow” with a mouse. Most importantly, the player can be branded with a corporate logo for an integrated look and feel.

Podcasters who produce more than a single show now have a way of presenting up to five of their related shows in a single widget on their site, blog or social services. As each new episode debuts, it automatically gets pushed to the podcaster’s “widget,” wherever it has been syndicated by fans. The podcaster’s fans can “get” the player and put it on their site, blog or social site, carrying the podcaster’s logo and sponsored audio ads along with the content.

C.C. Chapman, a multi-show podcaster and social media strategist is currently showcasing this widget.

“I love that Personal Life Media is making it simple for anyone with multiple shows to pool them together into a widget that can then be placed on any blog or social networking site,” Chapman said.

“Not only can anyone make their own, but by allowing simple adjustments such as color and the adding of a custom logo, it truly makes it unique to every media producer.”

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Hosting by Profy.com, the podcast includes Cyndy Aleo-Carreira and Leslie Poston from Profy.com, Steve Hodson from Winextra and Mashable, as well as yours truly. In the first episode we cover Twitter clones, FriendFeed and democratization of meme tracking, why everyone should have a full feed, and then discuss privacy. It was a lot of fun, and the open, frank and differing opinions offer hopefully a different take on 2.0.

I can’t embed it unfortunately, but head over to Profy.com here to listen in. Hopefully in future weeks there will be an iTunes subscribe link as well. The show was hosted on Talkshoe, and we’re still working on the timing long term so more people can participate by listening live or via the chat room. Enjoy.

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