Good question. But really, what is a podcast?
Well, I like to think of a podcast as any internet media that can be subscribed to.
The word comes from Apple’s iPod and “broadcast.”
Generally a “podcast” refers to a series of episodes of internet media, but can also refer to the episodes themselves.
What does that mean? A podcast is a lot like a radio or television show. They are generally created to spread the word about news on a particular topic, or to teach people about a subject.
One of the best examples of a podcast is Leo Laporte’s “this WEEK in TECH” (TWiT for short), which is located at TWiT.tv.

The stuff behind the scenes that make podcast subscriptions work is called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS “feeds” are bits of text (XML) that contain all of the information about each episode of a podcast, such as the title, the link to download it, the duration, etc. This feed is what iTunes reads and is how it knows when there is a new episode to download.

Still want to learn more?
Check out this awesome video made for PodGrunt