The responses to the podcast have been overwhelmingly positive! We're glad you're enjoying it! However, there have also been many questions about podcasting and some of the terms associated with it. So I'm going to give a quick explanation that should help you along.

Please keep in mind, you don't have to do any of this. We'll continue to post links directly to the MP3 files so you can download them manually. If reading the information below makes your brain start to ooze out your ears, just skip it.

A "podcast" is how people normally refer to an audio blog. However, that's technically incorrect. The "podcast" is actually the "newsfeed" for that audio blog. And a "newsfeed" is simply a file generated by a website (an RSS feed using XML, for you techies out there) that is automatically updated. It contains a list of the most recent news articles and, if applicable, links to the recent audio blog postings.

A "newsfeed reader" or "podcast reader" is simply a program you download and run on your computer. You give it the link for a newsfeed (ours is http://www.theforce.net/outnews/podcast.rss), and you configure the program to check that link every so often. If there are new articles or audio files, it will automatically download them and let you read them through the newsfeed reader program.

Note that if you browse to "http://www.theforce.net/outnews/podcast.rss" in your web browser nothing comes up. It's blank. Some other sites' feeds will also be blank, or some will give you XML code. That's because these links are only designed to be used in a newsfeed reader.

Here's the thing most people seem to get confused on... To "subscribe" to a newsfeed, you don't have to sign up for anything. There's no registration page, no form to fill out, nothing like that. If you use a newsfeed reader and you tell it to regularly download articles from a certain site, that means you've "subscribed" to that feed. All it means is that you've set that feed up to automatically download.

I tried to avoid giving out information on any specific newsfeed readers, as I don't want to officially endorse any. Nor will we provide support for any of them here at TFN. However, if you want to Google some names, FeedDemon is a really good newsfeed reader, and its more recent version supports podcasts; it's a little more complicated to set up than some programs, but it's also very comprehensive. Podcast Receiver is another good one if you're looking for something very simple. I use a PDA, not an iPod, but I'm told that if you have an iPod, the iPodder program at http://www.ipodder.org is very good, and that site has lots of information on podcasting, has links to other newsfeed readers too, and has a very large directory of podcasts for other sites.

I hope this helps. Hopefully this is enough to get most of you up and running so you can have your podcasts automatically downloaded whenever they're posted. I'll try to be helpful, but I can't guarantee I can answer a lot of technical questions, so I highly recommend checking out some of the existing resources on the net.

And once again, you can still listen to our podcast in any old MP3 player just by clicking the link for the MP3 file in each podcast's news article. You don't have to go through the above process unless you want to.

One last tidbit of information... There is a "Podcast" page here at TFN, but it's not one of the featured subsections on the home page (those are for more news-related topics). You can browse to it at any time by using the drop-down navigation menu in the upper-left corner of the site, or you can go there directly at any time by visiting http://www.theforce.net/podcast/.