You started up iTunes the other day, and noticed a new option in the sidebar: “Podcasts”. Your iPod has the same thing. A number of your favorite websites are offering you Podcasts, and just the other day one of your friend referred you to his own Podcast. What the heck is a Podcast, anyway? Let Of Zen and Computing hook you up with some knowledge…
Basics of Podcasting
Here’s what iTunes has to say about Podcasting:
“Podcasts are radio shows that are downloaded over the Internet. You can find a wide variety of podcasts in the Podcast Directory. Subscribe to them and iTunes will automatically download new episodes.”
The key words in this description are subscribe and radio shows. A Podcaster is one who records his or her own radio show, and then uses various technologies to syndicate the episodes of their show so that a subscriber (you) may download the podcast’s audio files when they become available. Those audio files can be saved to the subscriber’s computer or multimedia device (such as an iPod) for playback at any time.
More on the delivery of a Podcast
As we just mentioned, podcasts are syndicated by the author (podcaster) so that subscribers can be kept abreast of the latest content. The most common method of syndicating a podcast is with an RSS feed — a machine-readable text file containing the locations of the podcast’s most recent content. Various websites and software applications exist to monitor and interpret these RSS files, and deliver their most recent content to you, the subscriber.
A few websites and applications that can deliver podcasts to you are:
The technology may be called Podcasting, but you do not need an iPod to listen to a podcast. Podcasts can be saved to a variety of digital audio players. Or, you can just listen to them on your computer.
For more information about RSS, see A non-technical explanation of RSS.
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