"I'm like that homeless person on the corner that just rants no matter who's listening," Ms. Misceli said. "I forget that Drew's recording this online. Sometimes people will write us, and I sit back and say, 'How do they know that?' And then I go, 'Oh, it's on the Internet."'

While Internet-based recorded audio is not new, podcasting combines audio with an online subscription technology known as R.S.S., or Really Simple Syndication. To keep up with a multitude of Web sites, users can pull together their reading material, or feeds, in one place using software called an R.S.S. reader. In late August, Adam Curry, 40, a former MTV host turned entrepreneur, wrote a program allowing automatic downloads of new audio shows using R.S.S. The shows can be played on a computer or transferred to a portable MP3 player, like an iPod -- hence the name.

"That's where the big 'Oh, wow!' factor comes in," Mr. Curry said by phone from his home in Belgium. "Now you just subscribe, and if at some point you don't like it, you just unsubscribe. They've had this stuff out there, but there's no way to get it regularly to make you a listener."

Mr. Curry's "Daily Source Code," a two-month-old show mainly on technology-related subjects, has inspired other podcasters to follow his lead. He came up with the idea for podcasting nearly four years ago, but it wasn't until he spoke soon thereafter with Dave Winer, an early blogger and the inventor of R.S.S., that Mr. Winer was able to modify R.S.S. so that it could support enclosed audio files. This works in much the way that e-mail messages can have attachments.

Most podcasters are amazed at the amount of attention that the new phenomenon has generated.

"I haven't seen this much buzz around a single word since the Internet," said Carl Franklin, 37, who teaches computer programming courses in New London, Conn.