One of the internet killer apps in our house is the streaming of live or recorded radio from around the world. My wife loves to listen to Canadian radio, particularly CBC, to keep her in touch with what's going on at home. I use the excellent BBC radio player to
"time-shift" recent programmes to a more appropriate hour.

The UK also has a very limited choice of music output for those with interests outside the mainstream, particularly for those outside London, where there are very few, if any, dedicated local or national non-digital music stations catering for a non pop/classical music audience. Access to niche stations from around the globe is thus a great asset for the British music fan.

I was therefore very interested to find out from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools
weblog about a new service called RadioTime, which pulls together in one place the schedules and feeds of around 5,000 radio stations from around the globe. The real clever bit is that for a subscription of $39 a year, the user gains the ability to program the site to download selected programs to your hard disk for listening at your convenience. As per Kevin Kelly's review:-

There are 36,000 radio stations world-wide streaming some part of their programs. Only a tiny sliver of all that is produced is aired in one locale... Whole rivers of great stuff -- music, stories, interviews, talk, sports -- are flowing by invisibly. A monthly subscription to RadioTime will record your favorites, but also make visible and manageable this sonic tide, an entirely new territory.

It will inevitably take time for people to get used to the concept of global, user-definable radio, but when they do it will revolutionise the ways in which we listen and the content we listen to.