Peter Griffin: Cast your net for your favourite media download

Close your eyes for a few seconds and you'll miss a new web trend emerging.

The one I became aware of just a few days ago was podcasting - and no, it has nothing to do with fishing.

In fact, it's a new way of listening to internet-based audio files. You download them to your computer, transfer them to your portable music player and listen as you go about your day.

Or is it even new? The more I read about it, the older podcasting sounds.

The term - an abbreviation of broadcasting and iPod - is just a hip name for downloading audio content.

I'm not as out of the loop as I thought. I've been doing that for years, downloading snippets of audio books or interviews with actors or writers, and listening to them on my music player, a basic device from SanDisk.

Nevertheless, I like the more specific concepts that podcasting is trying to foster. It seems there is a web-based movement gathering steam to generate more content specially made to be played back on portable music devices built by Apple, Archos, iRiver and a hundred other electronics makers.

Podcasts are being created in the common MP3 format and free of digital rights management, so they can be played happily on most devices.

Podcasting hype reached a frenzy this week when a survey appeared in the US claiming 6 million of the 22 million Americans who own MP3 music players have downloaded a podcast. The research seems a little flaky, but I really can see podcasting taking off as more people switch to high-speed internet connections.

If you have a favourite daily radio news show, in the spirit of podcasting, you can download it overnight, transfer it to your iPod the next morning and listen to it on the way to work, uninterrupted by advertising or buffering problems where the internet feed drops out for one of a hundred reasons.

The podcasting charge seems to be led by so-called bloggers, who post self-penned columns on the web. A lot of them are now recording themselves reading their postings, then uploading the audio files to the internet.

Podcaster Father Roderick Vonhogen, a Dutch Catholic priest, has been getting huge publicity for his podcasts reflecting on the death of Pope John Paul II.

The podcasting priest also has a great sense of humour - look at the mock iPod ad on his website www.catholicinsider.com.

"In an hour I will take the plane to Rome from Schiphol airport. The upcoming week I will be podcasting from the Vatican to keep you informed about everything that's happening over there," he wrote this week.

Lists of podcasts can be found on websites such as Ipodderx.com and Podcastalley.com.

Many podcasts are being disseminated through the bloggers' trusted tool, the RSS (really simple syndication) feed. This is a web format that allows content to be delivered as an internet link.

Web surfers do not need to visit a particular site to download a podcast, but can click on an RSS feed sent to them in an email or posted to another site.

Podcast feeds are also downloadable using Bittorrent, the technology that's become associated with illegal music downloads. Here, it seems, is a more legitimate use of Bittorrent's excellent technology. It allows you to begin uploading a file to others as soon as you begin downloading it to your computer.

The scope for commercial podcasting services seems great, especially as cellphone and MP3 player technologies merge. In the future, what's to stop you cutting out the PC and directly downloading podcasts to your phone-cum-music player?

The trend has been compared with TiVo, the personal video recorder you can buy in the US that records live TV and lets you play back content without watching the ads. It's an advertiser's nightmare.

Until now, radio stations, even web-streaming stations, have been immune to TiVo syndrome. But as podcasts become available, listeners begin stripping the ads from programming.

It seems unlikely that mainstream radio stations will happily embrace podcasting. But there is little to stop web broadcasts being recorded, repackaged as MP3 files and sent out onto the internet for millions to download.

Paris Hilton has her own podcast and there are podcasts about the latest gossip and backstabbing from the New York fashion industry at Fashiontribes.com.

US space agency Nasa also has a podcast covering everything celestial at http://science.nasa.gov.