I don’t know how you cope with the day to day pressures, I don’t know that my life could be any busier or the demands on my time be any greater. It only makes sense, given how much my life is driven by technology, that the little respite that I find in my daily life comes by way of a little technology phenomenon called podcasting. Podcasting is basically a form of Internet radio.

One of the things that makes podcasting so different from TV or even commercial radio is that almost anyone can produce a “show” and there are no real limits on how much time a podcast host time can devote to any given subject, so they tend to be much more conversational, almost approaching a two-way mass-media conversation. I started listening to podcasts around the time that Tech-TV went “off the air” so I just thought that this was cool to have another venue to connect to that was about the technology world. What I didn’t anticipate was that bringing Leo and Amber and Tom and Molly and Veronica and a host of others into my life on a daily basis was going to generate such a strong sense of community and emotional attachment as it has.

For the second time in exactly two months this has been devastatingly brought home to me when I heard this evening that the body of CNET Editor James Kim had been found. He and his wife and two young daughters had been reported missing November 25th as they were returning to the San Francisco area after visiting family in the Pacific Northwest. Several podcasters broadcast the story and information about the families last known whereabouts and the story eventually made the front page of the CNN.COM. Two days ago Kim’s wife and two daughters were found safe by a helicopter search team near where their car had become stuck in the snow on a back road they had taken, attempting to reach the Gold Coast area of Southern Oregon. Two days before they were rescued James had left his wife and daughters in the car to get help on foot, but never returned.

I grew up watching the Vietnam War on TV and I know that every day somewhere in the world another human life is being snuffed out. Even when I’ve saw the horrible footage of the tsunami that swept away hundreds of lives in Southeast Asia, somehow it didn’t really reach me. But every day for the past week I’ve clung to news on how the search was going, and felt a really sense of fear as the days ticked by and the family remained lost. Previously I’d downloaded the podcasts James had done with co-host Veronica Belmont, but hadn’t listened to many of them. It strangely became important to me that I play back the year’s worth of recordings they’d done on MP3 news and tech happenings. I can’t explain this connection that I feel with these strangers whom I’ve never met, but there is something about this conversation that makes these loses all too real and all too painful.

Maybe it’s my own unrealized wanting of family and little ones and the desperate attempt of a father to save his family and children combined with dozens of stupid little conversation seemingly overheard of james giving his review this this technology gadget or gizmo. There just so much less “the wall” put up between the media personality and the viewer when it comes to podcasts than there is in TV or commercial radio. I do not know these people, but I am very very sad that a good man and another podcast-friend has been lost and will be so greatly missed. Life is just too damn short to live with any less passion than James had for his family. JBB

Music: In Memoriam: James Kim, 1971-2006 from the album “CNET TV: My Playlist” by CNET.com