Podcasting. "I haven't seen this much buzz around a single word since the internet," says Carl Franklin of New London, Conn., referring to "podcasting" -- or the distribution of internet-based audio recordings via R.S.S., as reported by Cyrus Farivar in The New York Times. R.S.S. -- or Really Simple Syndication -- traditionally has served primarily as a way to distribute reading material, by enabling users to aggregate subscriptions to their favorite online content (e.g., Cool News), using a software application known as an R.S.S. reader. But about four years ago, Adam Curry, the former MTV veejay, came up with the idea that audio files could be "attached" to R.S.S. feeds in much the same way any file might be attached to an e-mail message. Adam ran the idea past Dave Winer, credited as the inventor of R.S.S., and Dave and Adam figured out how to do it.

Adam used his freshly-minted code to podcast a program called Daily Source Code, live.curry.com, about, yes, podcasting. So, now, podcasters are popping up all over the place -- from California, South Carolina and Connecticut, to western Canada, Australia and Sweden. There's the Dawn and Drew Show, www.dawnanddrew.com, in which a young married couple from Wayne, Wisconsin, "play off each other like Abbot and Costello" for a half-hour each day. They've got a few hundred listeners. Carl Franklin, who otherwise teaches computer programming courses, hosts a show called .Net Rocks!, a show about programming language. Most interesting, even some radio stations are using podcasts as a way to grow their audiences. Both KOMO in Seattle and WGBH in Boston (yay, Red Sox!) "have taken some of their regular radio shows and made them available as podcasts."

"Your potential audience is the entire world, says Carl Franklin. "So if you have content that has specialized interests, you can pull in 100,000 listeners. You can sell targeted advertising. You can have a better relationship with your audience and have a big enough audience to justify your existence." (That's right, it filets, it chops. It dices, slices, never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn. Step right up). Adds Tony Kahn, podcaster of Morning Stories, on WGBH: "People are basically passive and so one voice counts a lot and is deeply respected ... To know that there are 10,000 people who have downloaded -- that, to me, is a huge number of people responding and saying, 'I'm interested in this, and it means something to me." Most podcasts have much smaller audiences, of course. But, according to Adam Curry, there are now "about 300 podcasters worldwide," and "thousands of people were either listening to or producing" them. If you'd like to set yourself up to listen to podcasts, go to: www.ipodder.org.

Tim Manners, editor