What Is An RSS Feed? Articles | IPod

By: Darren Williger

RSS feeds are very important to the transferring of podcasts and being able to upload them and have them updated regularly.  If you are not completely sure what a podcast is, it is a file that can be distributed regularly.  The files, clips, or episodes are of music, videos, news, comedy shows, and anything else people think of record and turn into a podcast.  Anyone receiving podcasts are subscribers and use a podcast client to view and to also receive regular updates and feeds of new podcasts that are being added every day.

If you’re not sure what a podcast client is, simply it is a program that you can download free and it enable you to watch your podcasts.  A podcast client search through RSS feeds and updates your podcasts episodes as it sees new ones available.  RSS feeds are readable by machines that search out coding and have become an integral part of the podcasting world.

RSS feeds were originally developed to share blogs and new blogs posts.  RSS feeds distributed out blog posts to all the subscribers of a particular blog.  This worked so well that over time people figured out that you can do the same thing with media files, by just changing the coding.  So, coding was added to RSS feeds to recognize media files and search out media files and download them to a subscribes computer.

Thus, leading now to the RSS feeds being used for podcasts.  People added new coding and developed the feeds for what are now podcasts.  There are a few reasons why podcasts have become so popular.

• Podcasting is very inexpensive and does not cost a lot of start up money to create a podcast.  Or if you are subscribing, most are free to download.  There are some that do require a subscriber fee; however the fee is usually not costly at all.
• You can share these podcasts so quickly.  Because the podcast client searches for the RSS feeds that are for podcasts, subscribers always have the latest episodes available.  And creators can very quickly and efficiently distribute their chosen medium with very little cost or time involved.
• All types of video and audio can be turned into podcasts.  Which means anything and everything imaginable can be turned into a podcast and distributed to people all over the world. 

A big reason why podcasts have had so much success is because of the RSS feeds.  These feeds have enable media to be distributed in a cost effective, quick, and non evasive way.  Subscribers do not have to go to a web site any longer and search through files and find what they want and then download it.  Now subscribers only have to sign up for the feed and new podcasts are sent to them so they can view them when it is most convenient for them. 

With so much popularity now with the podcasts, news organizations such as CNN have turned to podcasts to distribute their news to many people who typically would not watch.  Along with radio stations like NPR that also use podcasts to create a larger fan base and draw in more listeners.  Without RSS feeds podcasts would never have made it to where they are now.