Podcasting: question

[Christopher11]

I am putting together some ideas for half hour to hour long talk shows, also featuring music, as podcasts.

I'm a musician and run a studio so i can do the recording and mp3 encoding, i also have a website and plenty of bandwidth and storage space. I have an active blog, hosted at my website so i think that will be helpful.

My question is, once i create an mp3 of my show, what next? I don't understand the RSS part of this. How do i publish this as a podcast, and what officially makes it a "podcast" and not just an mp3 people are downloading?

Would it make the most sense to use my blog: create a blog post for each podcast, and use that for RSS feeds? Is that just an announcement with a link, and the link is the podcast that opens in people's iTunes?

Thanks as always for any replies.

[edonetampa]

Take a look at this. Very simple and easy to use. Also gets things ready to load into iTunes' list of podcasts.

http://www.lemonzdream.com/podcastmaker/

We have been using this to produce podcasts from mp3's for our radio show for the last 3 years. Yes, it's not free, but it does work really well.

Hopefully this helps!

[SrWebDeveloper]

Just wanted to add that Podcast Maker is *spectacular* software - it fully utilizes the multimedia capabilities of podcasting these days in both iTunes and standard RSS formats. Meaning, use it to create the podcast, it creates the files you need complete with any optional cover art, images, movies, sound, descriptions and links that you add (mostly via drag/drop) then you send it to your website, done. Most people use simplified RSS formats only, i.e. boring text links. Few know that RSS and iTunes format allow for all those multimedia addons, making your feed stand out from the rest if you use those features. Especially when users subscribe via iTunes.

So I recommend that software as well - it's the best way to do podcasting in my opinon, hands down.

BTW, here is a history on podcasting.

-jim