One thing which the repackaged mainstream media content providers have ignored (so far) has been enhanced podcasts ie with bookmarks.

This allows listeners to more easily skip parts of any show that they don’t want to hear.

One of the great things about the fact this technology has picked up by so many grass roots level podcasters is they are trying out things like enhanced podcasts, and indeed vidcasts. By test driving these new methods and business models the mainstream media can learn from them at lower expense.

It is this experimental nature of the medium that I believe has made it so exciting for consumers and providers alike.

This is what I was going to say at the beginning (but didn’t quite use all of it) - I hope it gives you more of an understanding where I was going with ‘ubiquitous wifi’. And perhaps I’d better post this on my own blog, too.

“A new generation of media consumers has risen, demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much AS they want it”.

Those aren’t my words, but those of Rupert Murdoch, a man who knows a thing or two about the media.

I rather enjoy Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme, which has spent the last two weeks celebrating the fact that it is now available on a podcast by running light-hearted and slightly tedious emails from people saying that they’ve been using cassette tapes to record the programme for a while, so does that make them early-adopters for podcasting?

Well, the session title here is personalised radio. Now, a part of personalisation is to make content to be delivered to consumers, as Murdoch says, when they want it. And there’s no doubt that portable media consumption - something radio does better than anyone else - is also part of what the new generation of media consumers want, to make sure they get their media how they want it. So podcasting ticks two out of the three boxes.

But perhaps the biggest part of personalisation is the content itself.

With radio we have one of the most versatile and easy-to-deliver forms of media available. Ubiquitous wifi could enable truly personalised one-to-one broadcasts available at any time, wherever we are.

Can I have The Today Programme without Thought for the Day, please?
Can I tweak Virgin Radio to play even more of the songs I like, and less of the songs I don’t?
Can I have Radio 2 without any single atom of Steve Wright in the Afternoon?

Virgin Radio has consistently beaten the BBC onto new platforms - from radio on satellite, to radio on the internet, to radio via daily podcasting. But the next generation of consumers will want to be able to take all the things that make us Virgin Radio: our music, our DJs, our news and information… and mash them up to suit them. It’ll make sure that they hear the music they want to hear - the speech they want to hear - and, yes, the commercial messages that they want to hear. It’s less The Music We All Love, and more The Music I Love.

Podcasting is a step towards this. But personalised radio - personalised AUDIO, if you will - is probably rather more.