Last week after Web 2.0 I spent a sunny Autumn morning wandering around in Brooklyn, including a stop at a favorite thrift store in Williamsburg. Pouring through their collections of old photos and postcards, a friend found something rather strange.

Amidst the christmas cards and “wish you were here” messages from Hawaii or Bali to friends or family were these funny post cards with call signs on the front and brief, almost functional messages on the back:

It turns out what we had stumbled on was a collection of QSLs, postcards sent back in the day from one shortwave radio operator to another to confirm that they had heard the transmitter’s station.

Before there were oodles of us pouring our conscious thoughts into the ether, whether by blog or 140 characters at a time, there was a smaller set of dedicated hobbyists creating soap boxes from radio antennas. And the fascinating part (at least to me) is how similar the emergent social gestures were. When one radio operator grok’d another’s signal, they’d fire off a postcard letting their new friend know their message was being heard.

As I imagine most shortwave operators would have, Ed Heger (@KA2HNO) collected his postcards as a sort of follow list. When lined up you can see he even checked each one off in the top left corner, perhaps as he logged them in a homemade database.

There is something definitively human about wanting to know your signal is being received, particularly when you’re casting it out into the void…

The experience was a great one for me personally — I haven’t done many speeches to that size or critical an audience — but I do find myself wondering what the benefits of giving a keynote at a conference ultimately are. I know this is a trite subject for those who frequent the conference circuit but it still gives me pause…