Podcasting is the creation and dissemination of MP3 files (known as podcasts) for people to listen to on their computer or on a portable MP3 player. These MP3 files are not the usual set of song files that many people download or copy from their CDs. These files are talk shows, music shows, recordings of talks and speeches and maybe people reading the texts of books -- the genre has a wide variety of formats but the most common at this point is podcasts similar to a radio show (talk, music, variety) that can be played on demand. The name is a derivative of the one for Apple's iPod.