"You can't buy your own radio station and do your own programming," said Maloy, 45, a pharmacy technician at Duke University Health System who lives in Durham. "But you can do an audio podcast."

The desire to learn the best and easiest ways to create podcasts -- homemade radio shows distributed over the Internet -- attracted Maloy to the first annual PodcasterCon at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Saturday. Which is just what Brian Russell, the organizer of the event, had in mind.

"We're encouraging people to make their own media," Russell, a local podcaster, told an audience of more than 150 people at the opening session. A show of hands revealed that the great majority had never created a podcast and a few had never listened to one.

Still, podcasting is creeping in from the fringe and entering the mainstream. Radio stations across the country, including Mix 101.5 in Raleigh, have packaged their programming into podcasts. Former vice presidential candidate John Edwards, a possible contender for the White House in 2008, launched a podcast last year. In the fall, Duke University played host to what was billed as the world's first academic symposium on podcasting.

Forrester Research projects that about 12.3 million U.S. households will be listening to podcasts by the end of the decade.

Podcasts already are plentiful. One Web site, podcastinglist.org, lists nearly 21,000 sources of podcasts. The latest podcasts listed cover an array of topics such as video games, "all things Disney" and reports on whooping crane activity across North America.

It seems podcasting is too cool and too hip for a conventional conference. PodcasterCon was billed as an "unconference," a more democratic gathering in which attendees established the agenda in advance via the Internet and audience participation was encouraged.

Democracy can be messy, however.

Attendees threw out a stream of questions at one of the morning sessions, "The 411 on How to Podcast," pushing and pulling the discussion into tangents.

But most found it informative. "You're dealing with a lot of people who are familiar with the Internet," said Joyce Ventimiglia, 38, a video production specialist at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics who lives in Durham. "They think in a nonlinear way."

Ventimiglia wasn't surprised to find that men in the audience far outnumbered women.

"Traditionally, men are more exposed to technology, culturally, than women are," she said. "I think women will be exposed to it. It's still a new technology. A lot of people, when you say podcasting, they don't know what it is."

Some were interested in podcasts as a form of self-expression, while others were looking at the business side of things.

Phil Daquila, 37, design and production director for Baseball America, a magazine and Web site based in Durham, was interested in both. He hopes to help his baseball-expert colleagues get into podcasting as a way to extend the company's reach.

Russell also said he hoped Saturday's gathering, which attracted people from across the country, would help create a sense of community among podcasters and would-be podcasters. Mark Welker, a community college student and freelance Web developer from Mount Airy, agreed.

"It's great coming here and [meeting] some of the people I have listened to for months," said Welker, 20.

The morning how-to session offered a tutorial on technical nuts and bolts leavened with practical advice: Make sure you edit your podcasts, especially if your speech is laced with uhs and ums.

"Keep your listeners in mind," said Robert Walch of Overland Park, Kan., who has a podcast featuring interviews with other podcasters.

Walch also offered a sobering assessment on the obstacles people face in attracting an audience for their podcasts.

"The people in this room, I'm afraid to say, are your competitors," he said.

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