THDL Toolbox > THL Technologies & Open Standards > Technologies For Dummies > Podcasts
What are Podcasts?
Contributors: David Germano.
Simple Introduction to Podcasts
A podcast is a digital file - usually an audio or video recording, but possibly images, text or other types of files - which is offered form a Web server to others in a way that it can be downloaded automatically in the background once a user chooses to subscribe to the podcast in question. Thus a Web site offers "feed channels" with different content, and a user subscribes to the "channel" which has content in which they are are interested. Once subscribed, new content on that channel will be automatically delivered to the user over the Internet when it appears. Users can then play it on their computers, or transfer to a portable media player such as an iPod for offline playing. It is called podcasting because of its early use to "broadcast" digital audio files that could be used in Apple's popular iPod players.
How are Podcasts being used in THDL?
We provide RSS Feeds for our Tibetan language instructional materials. In the future, we hope to more comprehensively provide such services in other areas.
How Can I Explore Podcasts Further?
See the 
Wikipedia article on Podcast for a short introduction.
Provided for unrestricted use by the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library