What is a Podcast?
Podcasting: Internet radio and TV delivered to you
If you’re new to podcasting or haven’t heard the term before, a podcast is basically an Internet-based radio or TV show in the form of an mp3 for audio and mp4 for video. People from all walks of life are creating their own podcasts on a variety of topics—from business to comedy to music to politics—and in a variety of formats such as talk radio, interviews, poetry readings, and music playlists. As with any other mp3, you can listen to a podcast by simply downloading it. Although podcasting takes its name from the iPod, you do not need an an iPod to listen to a podcast, or to create one. Your podcasts will play just as easily on the new Sony NW-HD3 Network Walkman™ Digital Music Player. In a nutshell, if you can download and play an mp3 file, you can listen to a podcast. There are more expensive devices with up to 100Gig’s of disk space available to play not only MP3 files but the video based MP4 files as well.
Subscribing to Podcasts
One of the biggest benefits of podcasting, though, is that you don’t have to check your favorite podcast web sites every day for new episodes and manually download them. Instead, there is software that allows you to subscribe to podcasts. When you subscribe, each new episode of the podcast is automatically downloaded to your computer—and can even be copied to your portable audio player—as soon as it becomes available. This makes it easy and convenient to stay up to date with your favorite podcasts, allowing you to listen at your leisure.
The software that allows you to subscribe to podcasts is called an aggregator. Aggregators have been popular for quite some time in the blogging world, where people use them to automatically retrieve new posts from their favorite blogs. More recently, aggregators have been modified so that they can also collect mp3’s, thus paving the way for podcasting. Some people even refer to podcast aggregators as “podcatchers”.
Some popular examples of aggregator software are iPodder and Doppler. Once you’ve installed an aggregator, simply enter the URL for a podcast and you’ve subscribed to it. The aggregator will then periodically check (you choose how often) for new episodes and will download them for you as soon as they appear, saving you the time of searching the Internet and manually downloading the files.
