Audio on demand: Here to stay?

I’m not terribly thrilled about the idea behind podcasts. For me, it was too little too late.
In high school I kept up with a variety of streaming internet shows and listened to a decent number of talking heads gab on about a variety of subjects via the internet. In more recent years, I’ve taken to listening to a variety of essays available on the web in the form of audio files. I never really got into audio books, but these interested me because it was familiar to the same sort of format you get information in during any lecture class.
So, when podcasting became big I kind of chuckled to myself. It’s nice to have a name—and a brand—to go with the concept of on-demand, digital radio, but I really think it’s just a stepping stone.
The iPod itself has even evolved behind podcasting. With the inclusion of video features, there is even a more robust lineup of content to download. Video podcasting (there has to be a better term than vodcasting) has become big, but I don’t think it has any real staying power.
These new media are nice, but they fail to go far enough. In a while, smart ink is going to start to grow and truly interactive experiences will be taking hold. Imagine being able to hold your newspaper in the morning and instead of just having it run through a portion of video or streaming audio, it could also respond to your touch. The beauty of the iPod was its simple design. That is great for listening to music, but not so great for accessing large amounts of information.
I think as flash style projects become more prevalent on internet news sites, we’re going to start to see more streamlined user interfaces for accessing the news. This, combined with cheaper technology means it’s very likely that digital, recyclable newspapers will start to appear in the next few years. But even if smart ink isn’t the press’s savior (or I suppose it would kill the press, but save the paper), look at all the other devices that could take on that same role.
PDAs, smart phones, laptops, tablet PCs, more advanced MP3 players and other fancy gadgets and gizmos all let users interact with their news and support a variety of media formats and can be updated on the fly—wirelessly. The iPod only gives users a barebones user interface and only supports videos and music. Granted, that’s leaps and bounds ahead of where we were a few years ago, but I just don’t see it being accessible enough, engaging enough and current enough to fend off other technology on the horizon.