What is a Podcast?
Is it a Radio Show?
The word “Podcast” is derived from iPOD and broadCAST and is an audio broadcast very similar to what you would find on a talk radio station that has been converted to an audio file that you can playback in a digital music player (iPOD) or a computer.
The “pod” in podcast was coined from “iPod,” the predominant portable, digital music player, although there are many “MP3 Players” out on the market which work very much the same. Although podcasts are mostly verbal they may contain music as well.
Using the RSS 2.0 syndication format, (Really Simple Syndication allows content from one site to be republished (syndicated) by another.) podcasts are made available to subscribers who might be looking for that information and they can then download that broadcast onto their player of choice.
Podcasting began to catch hold to the masses in late 2004. The ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet. Podcasting is different from other digital audio and video delivery in the use of syndication feeds. This allows podcasts to be automatically downloaded to a user’s media playback device if they become a “subscriber”…just as you could subscribe to a newsletter or news post.
