The History of Podcasting:

The first appearance of the word “podcast” in history was in an article in The Guardian on February 12, 2004. The creation of the term is credited to Ben Hammersley who wrote the article and used podcast as a synonym for audioblogging . The word stuck.

1- The first step in the history of Podcasting was blogging. Shortly after the arrival of the internet, weblogs, or as we know it "Blogs", started to appear. Blogging has become a popular way for people to share their thoughts and ideas on the internet very casually, and in many ways blogs are responsible for the existence of podcasts: Podcasting is just a progression from blogging.
Reading your favorite blogs became much easier with the creation of news feed technology, called RSS, by Dave Winer; so by subscribing to a blog’s news feed (also called RSS feed), you will be automatically notified of any new information posted on the blog and and a program called "news reader", or aggregator, will regularly check the blog for updates and download them to your computer.

2-The next step in the history of podcasting was audio blogging, created due to faster connection speeds and the ability to transfer larger pieces of information. Therefore, instead of writing their thoughts, they recorded themselves speaking and posted it to their blogs as an MP3 file, but the problem with audio blogs was that readers had to regularly check for new MP3 files, visit the web site to download them and then synchronize them to their MP3 players by hand.
So, Adam Curry worked on simplifying this process, he improved it in a way that whenever a new MP3 file is posted to a blog,it would be automatically detected and downloaded in the RSS feed, which means that the feed tells your computer where to download the audio file.

3-The last step in podcasting history is when Adam wrote the first podcatcher software (or collector for podcasts). This software checks for new updates and reads the feed to see where to go and download the audio file. The MP3 was then automatically transferred to an iPod.

Podcasting would not have happened without the rapid spread of MP3 files and MP3 players. MP3s allow audio to be compressed into small enough files to be transferred on the internet and stored on small devices.
The story of podcasting doesn’t really stop there; New podcasting technologies continue to emerge, new markets are being created, new ideas are being formed. Podcasting is moving at the speed of light.

Nabiha Abdul-wahab