Scripting News is usually a set of one- or two-liners with links, but every now and then Dave Winer lets loose with something a little longer. Here’s one that takes the cake: “It Worked!”, a report on an incident during Monday’s debut of KYOU, the new “all podcast” radio station in San Francisco. Sure it’s a bit of a rant. Those numbers that don’t mean anything to Dave probably do mean something to the administrators of the public radio station he’s punching, which may be one of the reasons they’re administrators. That said, Dave gets a bunch of things right in this essay. One is that podcasting really is a dream come true for old radio guys and gals: “Of course the really good [radio people] are excited, because podcasting is the realization of the reason so many of them got into broadcasting in the first place.” Another is that public radio is too often a snooze-fest. A third is that people are creative in ways that not only surprise and refresh us, but also stimulate us to reimagine aspects of our daily lives and make something golden out of what appears to be mere dross. Deeply inspiring stuff.

That’s another truth about radio: those invisible voices coming out of nearby objects (call ’em “radios” if you want) simulate a kind of telepathy, or at least an internal conversation. Radio is an intriguing way to virtualize and share consciousness. “The theatre of the mind” is anything but a cliche. And now with podcasting, radio extends its reach and, potentially, its intimacy, while at the same time it allows all of us to share our surprising moments of revelation with each other. Case in point: the other day I was listening to one of Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” podcasts, and as Adam walked around his Guildford “cottage” grounds I had a very vivid sense of walking alongside him. Partly that was because of the live you-are-there nature of Adam’s podcasts, and partly it was because Adam is a very skilled radio guy who understands how to let that moment-by-moment narration breathe and convey the experience to the listener. At one point, Adam took us down into a bomb shelter the previous owners had constructed during the Nazi bombing raids of World War II. Adam cleared the brush away, stepped down into the shelter, and suddenly the echo of the room and the sharp change in Adam’s voice gave me goose-bumps all over. I was there in that room with him, feeling the cold and clammy air, and thinking with him about the people who had once huddled in that small space to save their lives.

Just a podcast. Just a moment of revelation that has stayed with me for days and would have been lost otherwise. Just a chance to connect, once again, and very powerfully, with a moment of shared humanity.