If you are ready to dive into the world of content creators than you might want to check that you have the necesary equipment. Although you can spend lots of money on fancy equipment to do high quality recording and editing, you can get started without spending a dime. Here is what you will need:

A mic to speak into. Your computer may have a built in mic that you can use for this. An external mic may give you better sound quality, and if you are not going to be sitting in front of your computer you may consider a stand-alone digital voice recorder or a lavaleir mic with an RF transmitter. For a more detailed description of your options check out this wiki

Recording software. Quicktime pro works well on a mac or PC but costs $30. The free program Audacity is available for mac and PC and Linux and is equally well suited to the task of recording sound to a digital file, provided you also donwload the free LAME plugin for exporting to the mp3 format. If you are recording your audio with a stand-alone digital recorder or you have other mean of generating the compressed digital audio file then you won't need this software.

Note if you want to make a video podcast you'll need a camera. and software to encode it into a format that iPods can read (i.e. h.264 or mpeg-4). Quicktime pro works for this, as does the free open source program Handbrake which is avaiable for the mac and Linux. PC users can use Videora to accomplish the same task. Some still/video hybrid cameras can record directly to mpeg-4, which will allow you to bypass the compression step thereby saving lots of time.

Once your content is created you can publish it as a podcas using free tools like blogger and feedburner, or you can simplify the process by using a podcast creation tool like the $30 podcast maker for the mac or the $19 shareware Podcast RSS Buddy for mac or windows.