In a nutshell podcasting gives you, your organisation or your business a voice, accessible via a computer, mp3 player or by the latest mobile telephones. It's audio on-demand and the really clever part is that listeners can subscribe to your audio and once subscribed they will never miss future audio podcasts as they are automatically distributed to subscribers who can listen to them at their leisure. Podcasting is actually a combination of several technologies that have come of age. They are:

MP3 Compression - Reduced digital audio files making them easily transferable over the Internet.

Broadband Internet connections - Fast Internet broadband has been customary for sometime now and has dropped in price to an affordable level.

RSS - The really clever part that ties the other technologies together and without it podcasting wouldn't exist. RSS is a special webpage that's designed to be read by computers not humans! It contains all the information specific to the podcast e.g. it's title, duration, where the file is hosted etc. A RSS feed doesn't need to refer to an audio file, it could be video, text or image files but in podcasting it's specifically audio.
Go to Astral Voices RSS example page to get a taste of how RSS is transforming the Internet. The magic of RSS is that you no longer need to visit your popular websites; their content is pushed out to your RSS software.

Q. How do I listen to a podcast?

A. The most popular way is via the apple itunes software; it's free and works on windows & mac computers. If you have a yahoo account then check out yahoo podcasts. Many sites allow you to listen to a podcast directly from their site, which is practical for new users. For example listen to some podcasts Astral Voices has spotlighted right now.

Click on the images on the right to see a gallery of popular podcast players, RSS readers & podcast directories