Mike Miller and his wife Paulette Miller joke around during their live internet radio broadcast Tuesday evening inside the W4CY studio in Wellington. (Brandon Kruse / The Post)

If the Internet is the town square in our new global society, then Internet radio is the new speaker’s corner, where anybody, regardless of wealth or social standing, can rise up and be heard above the fray.

Someone like this guy.

“Welcome back to Ska Safari with Rude Boy Rising. We’re on with Chilled Monkey Brains, a quality ska crew from Tallahassee!”

In the corporate radio world of 2009, it’d be hard to find prime drive-time space for a Florida band not on the national playlist. But it’s just a random Tuesday afternoon at the Wellington studios of W4CY (www.w4cy.com), an inspired marriage of democracy, capitalism, new technology and old-fashioned “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show” gumption.

If you’ve got a good idea, the time and about $1,000 worth of sponsorship a month, your voice could be heard here. And to hear it, all you need is an Internet connection.

“This is the wave of the future,” says co-owner Dean K. Piper, a motivational speaker who started the station with business partner Peter Wein in March as a community-building tool and an alternative to the programming confines of “terrestrial radio. We don’t want to be like every other radio station.”

Zach Starling hosts Ska Safari on W4CY. (Brandon Kruse / The Post)

W4CY’s programming, which runs seven days a week and includes live shows and a few hours of rebroadcasts, is an eclectic mix of topics and hosts that call to mind both the randomness and non-mainstream playlists of college radio (Ska Safari and the doo-wop-themed Harmony Street) and the public affairs-mindedness of NPR (Pet Health Cafe and Get Real: Straight Talk From Teens With Teens, hosted by Piper’s 14-year-old daughter, Rachael, and her friend, Rachel Kaplan, also 14.)

Piper, who says that the station has been heard in 41 countries and knows of listeners who “are sneaking and listening to it at work,” says W4CY strives to provide positive programming, a local voice — especially for people in the western communities — and to encourage hosts to reach out of the station’s office off Lake Worth Road and find a community, whether in their own back yard or across the ocean.

It’s not just advantageous for hosts — for musicians, authors and people with something to promote, being a guest on a tiny station no longer means being heard only by the people nearby. Now, anyone who logs on is a potential customer, fan or advocate.

“The thing about Internet radio,” says local musician Andrew Bayuk, appearing on Wein’s show Peter’s Living Room to perform selections from his new album of ancient Egypt-inspired songs, “is that it’s the next big thing. This is global stuff, one of the best ways to share your music.”

Like a starlet of old discovered at a drugstore counter, W4CY’s personalities were discovered in some random and novel ways. Rude Boy Rising ran into Piper and Wein on a smoke break outside their building, where he works as the logistical manager for a chicken exporting company. Danny Ryde, host of the anime-centric FanBase, is the office intern.

Engineer Chad Murphy works on Ska Safari at W4CY in Wellington. (Brandon Kruse / The Post)

And Dave Knapp, Southern-area commander of the American Legion and host of the vet-based “The Knappster Show: A Soldier Still Serving,” had been a guest before he got his own show.

“(On the radio), there’s more of a chance that we can get more veterans to join,” he says. “And I like talking.”

Every one of the station’s diverse shows has one thing in common — the studio, a small, white room with a scratched blue table bearing a few microphones, seven office chairs and an impressive sound board set up in the corner and manned by Chad Murphy, the station’s lone engineer.

“I believe in doing it right,” Piper says. “We spent thousands of dollars on the equipment, because we view it as a real radio station.”

It’s not fancy, but there’s a high-tech element, with hosts manning laptops to monitor the activity in their show’s chat rooms.

“We’ve got 13 people in there already!” marvels Nashville artist J.D. Danner, before the start of That’s Life, a zingy, topical funfest whose regular cast of characters include Danner and Manny Bruno, the manager of Nino’s Italian Restaurant in Delray who was always so funny at the restaurant that he got a slot on the show.

While some of W4CY’s hosts, like Bruno, have never had a public forum, others, like doo-wop singer and Harmony Street host Mike Miller, use their shows as another way to promote a long-standing career. Miller began singing doo-wop as a kid in New York and has been in the groups The Islanders, Vito and the Salutations, George Galfo’s Mystics and Harmony Street, which shares a name with his show. He says his personal expertise informs the show.

“A lot of DJs play a tune and they can’t tell you who wrote it,” says Miller, who hosts the show with his wife, Paulette, a former Miss Maryland in the Miss USA pageant.

“Mike can also tell you who’s playing sax, and what kind of sax,” Paulette adds.

Piper and Wein are in on the fun, too — both host their own shows, and Piper sometimes guests in other slots, participating in a parent-kid debate on his daughter’s show.

“I heard from a woman who said ‘Thank you for that show. I now realize that my teen is normal,’ ” Piper says.

Wein, who had considered a career in comedy or theater but “got it out of my system,” says the station “is a way to bring in other artists who have a passion and talent. We’ve had musicians, magicians … everything but a radio mime.”

W4CY is now global, but its owners have even bigger plans — they’re preparing to launch a related Internet TV station and are holding a music festival for local artists, including engineer Murphy, one-half of country duo Chad and Heather. They have several slots available for new programming, so even more ordinary people can step onto this most sophisticated of soapboxes and be heard.

“There’s so much potential, and we’re willing to promote this anywhere and everywhere,” Piper says. “This is just the start.”