This is an idea that's been dancing around in my head for a while, and just came back to the forefront of my thoughts recently. I want someone to invent a program, a transfer protocol, or some other technology by which I can insert a hyperlink to a portion of an audio or video file that's stored at some web address. Not the whole file, just a specific portion.
So if there's a podcast, and I want someone to listen to a fifteen-second clip from time index 28:19 to 28:34, I could write a link on my page which would fetch and play that clip.
I don't know much about the technology behind streaming audio or video, and I don't know whether this would be invented as a standalone program, a plugin for WinAmp or Firefox, or a universally accepted URI such as mtp:\\greghowley.com\musicfile.mp3:28.19~28.34
So hopefully someone invents this soon. When they do, I'll link back to this post and claim that I thought of it first.
The alternative is for your app to (1) download the clip, (2) decompress and play it silently until it gets to the beginning of the desired snippet (3) play and buffer the snippet and (4) play it back to you or save it with appropriate header information. Sloppy.
You could always download the track, then edit out the bits you don't want, I suppose.