What’s A Podcast?
People sometimes think they need an iPod to hear a podcast; that’s not true!
A podcast can be played on your computer, no problem. Or you can visit this site and stream the podcast, a cool feature that we offer. And podcasts can be played on most of the other portable mp3 players.
Simply put, a podcast takes a feed (sometimes called “rss,” “xml/rss”) and adds audio or video to the mix (or sometimes both). That feed is a text file with links to the audio or video content. Programs equipped to download podcasts can read the text file and download the media files at prescribed times that you determine. Often times putting this podcast link into your program is called “subscribing to the feed” or podcast.
Once you “subscribe” to a podcast, the content is delivered to your computer passively when you start the program, you don’t need to do anything after subscribing, the content just comes (though, you could also make this process happen manually). Then you can listen to the content when ever you want. You might think of it as Tivo for you computer; you choose what programs you want to subscribe to, it comes to your computer, then you listen to it at a time that’s convenient to you.
What kinds of programs can you use? Well, there are many, but the most popular for both Mac and PC is iTunes. The program is free, and most podcasts are free (99%). Two thirds of the people that subscribe to the Photo Share Podcast do so with iTunes.
If you want more information about podcasting, take a look at the Wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
And, if you have any questions, let us know!
