Podcasting is the new media. A recent Bridge Ratings study indicated that the number of people who downloaded a podcast has risen from 820,000 in 2004 to 4.8 million people in 2005. Projections for audience growth by 2010 predict adoption to reach 45 million users. According to Business Week, from the last six months of 2004 to the first six months of 2005, the number of podcasts published multiplied by 2500 percent.

Podcasting is the audio version of an RSS newsfeed. You may have noticed the RSS or Atom icon on your favorite news site. With the help of an application called an aggregator, a user can subscribe to a newsfeeds, which will automatically download the newest stories directly to the local desktop for later reading. RSS is the popular XML format that holds the subscription information.

A podcast generally uses an RSS file nearly identical to a newsfeed to allow podcast aggregators (or pod- catchers) to subscribe to an audio feed. Audio files are downloaded by the aggregator (often MP3 or AAC format) into a computer or media device. You can use a computer (or more often, an MP3 player or iPod) to listen to the content. The most popular single podcasting site is Apple’s iTunes Web site.

Joomla provides the capability to include a podcast on your site so that when you post audio files, they can be automatically added to the feed for subscribers to download. The PodCast Suite is a package of extensions that provide podcasting capabilities that can be downloaded here:  www.jlleblanc.com/joomla/Articles/Podcast_Suite,_Version_1-1_Stable/

The PodCast Suite package includes a component, module, and plug-in that work together to provide audio podcast hosting capabilities to Joomla. The extension supports integration with Apple’s iTunes. The Podcast Suite module displays a link to the dynamically created RSS feed file.

The feed is generated based on the parameters set in the component presented in the Administrator interface. The extension will automatically look for new media in the specified folder and generate the podcast subscription directory from those items.

Unfortunately, this extension doesn’t support video podcasting or vodcasting (video-on-demand-casting). With the tremendous growth of vodcasting, though, this oversight should be corrected soon.