What you need to know FIRST about Recording Audio
Good quality audio is very important. For whatever you do with audio, audio products, podcasts, or video recordings. Audio is vital, and the built in microphone in your laptop or the $10 headset from Best Buy just won't cut it. People will complain if you have noisey audio, echos, or low volume. It is definitely worth the investment to get a good condenser microphone for your computer. The difference is huge.
Then there's the software. There's lots of great free software out there that will do the job.
Blue Microphones Snowball USB Microphone
Blue Microphones Snowball USB Microphone
This is one of my favorite pieces of hardware. The Blue Snowball is a condenser microphone with that has a very good frequency response for the price. For just $100 you get a microphone that compares favorably to much more expensive studio quality microphones.
If you are going to be doing any audio recording whatsoever you will see the benefit of owning a microphone like this. Plus it'll look really cool on you desk.
Blue is very highly respected studio microphone company. They make really good stuff which is used to record some of the top recording artists. The guys at Blue really know what it takes to make a great microphone, and I love owning this one.
Start your research on microphones by taking a good look at the Blue Snowball at Amazon.com