Podcasting (also known as blogcasting) is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s). It became popular in late 2004, largely due to automatic downloading audio onto portable players or personal computers.
The Podcasting subscription model uses a RSS feed to deliver an enclosed file.

RSS 'Really Simple Syndication' is a collection of really simple standards for publishing articles of news. The standard describes three main things:

1. Channels. A channel is like a television channel - but there are a lot more RSS channels than TV channels. Each channel is devoted to a specific topic. The BBC, for example, has channels for: international news; news from England; news from London and so on. There are even BBC RSS feeds for individual football teams!
2. Items. An item refers to a specific item of news. Most items provide: a headline; a brief description; and a link to a page providing the full news article.
3. Enclosures (also known as Podcasts). Any item can contain an enclosure just like an Email can contain an attachment. Enclosures can be any type of file. For example: a music file; a video file; or a document. You tell the Aggregator which channels you are interested in and it monitors them for you.

BePodder is a kind of "Media Aggregator" a program to download files from Internet to your desktop.

Once you select a feed or location, it will download those files automatically at times you specify, so you don't have to spend a lot of time manually selecting and waiting for downloads. You can play your selected audio files using Soundplay, MediaPlayer, VideoLAN, or load them on to your iPod or other portable digital media player to play anytime you want.

BePodder uses RSS (really simple syndication) to "feed" files to your computer. Once you've installed BePodder, you can select podcasts to subscribe to in two different ways: Either clicking the selection button to see a directory of available podcasts or enter a URL for a podcast you've found on your own. You can set the scheduling options so that BePodder scans for new downloads as often as you like, or you can control it manually.

No you can use your computer or any other MP3 player.

BePodder 1.2.5. runs on BeOS 5, Haiku and Zeta. Next update will only support Haiku.

At present the BePodder software doesn't create podcasts.

Podcasts are all over the web. You can use directory to get you started or check out other directories published on the web: