Podcast, mp3, video : what you must know

A podcast is a multimedia file distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.
"Podcasting", created by Adam Curry, is a term that was devised as a crisp way to describe the technology used to push audio content from websites down to consumers of that content, who typically listen to it on their iPod (hence the "pod") or other audio player that supports mp3 at their convenience. The term podcasting is meant to rhyme with broadcasting and is a derivative of the iPod platform. While not directly associated with Apple iPod device or iTunes music service, the company did contribute both the desire and the technology for this capability. The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable player, and no broadcasting is involved. So, the word is not a registered trademark belonging to Apple.

Aware of that misleading association from the beginning, some writers have suggested alternative names or reinterpretations of the letters "p-o-d", without winning much of a following. For example, Ben Hammersley used this term in the Guardian on 2004, and in his article "podcasting" was meant as a portmanteau of the phrase "Personal-On-Demand Narrowcasting".

Podcasting uses an XML-based technology called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Content publishers describe new content in an XML RSS file which includes dates, titles, descriptions, and links to MP3 files. This auto-generated file is called an RSS feed. What makes podcasting special is that it allows individuals to publish (podcast) radioshows that interested listeners can subscribe to. Before podcasting you could of course record a radio show and put it on your website, but now people can automatically receive new shows, without having to go to a specific site and download it from there.

A podcast is often indicated by this icon:

This icon was introduced in Mozilla Firefox in order to indicate a web feed was present on a particular webpage that could be used in conjunction with the Live bookmarks function. Microsoft and Opera have adopted the icon in order to promote a defacto standard.