The Wall Street Journal mentions how public radio stations are using podcasts to increase their audiences.  I've been a believer for a long time.  But this technology is still very young and there's much more to do.  Here are some things I want in a podcast player:

• skip
• 30 sec forward/backward
• to next/prev segment
• find
• first/all occurrences of a particular word or phoneme
• particular speaker
• speed
• play back at faster than real time (I generally hear just fine at 1.2x - 1.5x real time) so you can finish a 1hr talk show in 40 min or less.
• don't speed up if music is playing
• mark: some way to mark a segment for later recall, such as linking it to a blog

What are some features you'd like to see?