If you’re a follower of Internet trends and the “next big thing”, podcasting should definitely be on your hot list. Podcasting hit the scene in late 2004 and in less than a year, it has simply exploded and looks to keep on growing. Researchers are predicting that the global podcast audience will grow from 840,000 subscribers last year, to about 56 million by 2010.

The term itself, “podcasting” is derived from combining the ever popular iPod plus broadcasting, thus the end result. However it’s a bit misleading because, an iPod is not required to receive or playback podcasts. In fact, you don’t even really need a portable mp3 player.

Podcasting is a method of offering media, such as mp3’s in most cases, via a subscription to an RSS 2.0 feed. Although mp3’s are the most common format of most podcasts, video distribution via podcast is beginning to take on popularity.

To subscribe and download content, a client is required. Various podcast clients are available for nearly all platforms. Apple has recently added the ability to subscribe to podcasts in the 4.9 version of iTunes. Several podcast directory sites, such as ipodder.org, provide an ever growing list of podcasters. The topics range from the expected tech talk to talks on how to improve your golf swing. The topics are endless. If you’ve been having a problem with filling up your 60 GB mp3 player, look no further!

For those who wish to publish a podcast you merely have to include the “enclosure” tag within your RSS 2.0 feed. More details can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/enclosuresAggregators

For the Mambo site owner that is looking for a podcasting solution, there is an answer. In fact, there are two that are readily available, Mambo Podcast and Loudbot.

Mambo Podcast is a podcasting suite based on a modified copy of the core Syndication component. The setup is straight forward and easy to use.Some nice features include the ability to podcast from a specific section and you can reference a file on an external server via a URL.The resulting RSS for your podcast is pretty basic, and will work on a majority of podcast clients. The downside of it is that it doesn’t support the tags necessary for podcasting via Apple’s iTunes, though this feature is currently being worked on and should appear in the next beta release.

Apple iTunes has a few additional tags that are specific to their service. If you’re itching to get yourself noticed on iTunes, then I recommend having a look at Loudbot. Loudbot is actually a bridge between Mambo and Loudblog. In order to use Loudbot, you need to install Loudblog. Loudblog is a full featured CMS for podcasting and has a number of cool features, such as the ability to leave audio comments and a nice little Flash audio player for on-demand playback. What Loudbot adds is the ability to embed the podcasts in Loudblog into the articles in Mambo. As the author of Loudbot puts it, “It gives the web site visitor the impression that it (Mambo) has built-in support for podcasting. So in reality Loudblog is doing all the work. The Loudbot + Loudblog solution requires a bit more tweaking, but there’s fairly good documentation on the Loudbot site.

If you’re interested in producing a podcast, have a look at these two solutions. Both work with Mambo 4.5.2.

Go to the links for more information:

Mambo Podcast - http://mamboforge.net/projects/mambopodcast

Loudbot - http://ektoras.agora.sonnexh.com/cms

Loudblog - http://loudblog.de

For a list of podcast clients check out: http://www.podcastingnews.com/topics/Podcast_Software.html