Steve Kinney

The word “podcast” is a concatenation of the words iPod and broadcast. The underlying technology used for podcasts, called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is capable of containing any type of media including audio, video, graphics, and more.

Podcasting is a way of publishing podcasts to the web, allowing people to subscribe to a podcast and receive new “episodes” automatically through an RSS feed. Podcasting consists of publishing XML files which contain references to media (called “enclosures”) to a website. Podcast aggregators (often called “podcatchers”), then read these XML files and download all the linked enclosures.

Unlike terrestrial and Internet radio, podcasts are time-shifted, meaning that listeners have control over when and where they hear their favorite programming. And, the episodes are delivered automatically to a subscriber on iTunes so the latest updates are always readily available with no effort required by the listener.