By Guilherme Athia*

When the Internet came to Brazil, around ten years ago, it used to be really boring due to its ordinary sites and badly written texts. The gradual and slow massification of the net has really aggregated to it, by providing it shape and real life. Little by little, the sites started to be coloured, full of photos and interesting movement.
Soon, ICQ, MSN, video, blogs, photologs and Orkut came up. Now, the audio is the new trend on the web. It is named podcasting. Perhaps you still don´t know much about it. Don´t worry, that´s not your fault.

That´s a new trend. It appeared in the United Sates over a year ago through the MTV ex-VJ called Adam Curry. However, just nowadays it started to draw the media and the ordinary people´s attention. I hope that with this article you become aware of what has been happening on the web, named podcast.

Podcasting means the use of technology and concepts that have existed since the very first moments of the world wide web, to do something new and revolutionary.

The podcast can be formed by songs, song parts, singles, interviews or a mix of all that in MP3 files, those ones that became famous due to a program elaborated in order to exchange digital files called Napster.

Once it is downloaded,you just listen to it trough your computer or a portable MP3. In order to make things clear: inspite of the fact that the name of such technology is closely related to iPod player, by Apple, any player can play a podcast. The podcast slogan is ‘listen to your favorite program whenever and wherever you wish to´.

The podcasting has something brand new: the listener receives automatically the new editions of a radio program without visiting it all the time. Afeter every new edition of the program the listener is notified and the podcast is automatically downloaded. Quick and simple.

Some important numbers: in the United States, for instance, 11 million people, according to the last official rate, listen to podcasts. That´s a reasonable number when you compare to São Paulo inhabitants (10.4 million) and astonishing for a technology that has been on the market for just a year.

In order to have a podcast downloaded, the listener has just to subscribe to the program he is interested in by adding the transmission address in his podcast software. It is all – or almost all – free, quick and simple.