Internet Relay Chat (IRC) facilitates SemanticWeb development and deployment. An Introduction to Internet Relay chat (IRC) gives the general background. W3C notes on IRC are tuned to the W3C community. And this community has its own reasons for liking IRC:
it's sorta synchronous -- you can get real-time alpha testing and code-review, support, and the kind of clarificationt that only dialog brings 1. Combined with weblog scratchpad, it's great for ConnectingAudiences. It is also great as a supplement to teleconferences; see ZakimDemo.
- it's sorta asynchronous; your client can log the conversation when you're not there. You can answer questions seconds, minutes, or hours afterward. Or you can follow up in email.
it's fun to hack. We have swBot, chump and logger, Zakim the teleconference agent, wikibot, trustbots, and more.
We use the the freenode IRC network for the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad and for the odd ScheduledTopicChat. The Semantic Web Interest Group server/channel is irc.freenode.net #swig (formerly we used #rdfig). ChannelsAreResourcesToo
Some good IRC clients include Xchat (all platforms), Xchat Aqua (for Mac Os X), MIRC (Windows only), irssi (a nice UNIX console client) and BitchX (another UNIX console free IRC client), Opera Opera - the browser includes an IRC client (all platforms).
In the XML 2004 Atom Hackathon, Tim Bray recommended BitchXfor OS X. Ooh... "Respond to irc:// urls".
IRC client development frameworks include:
Pynfo (usage experiene?)
The Jabber protocol is also looking pretty interesting, but doesn't seem to be used in practice enough yet for group chat. See JabberChickenEgg for notes on why this might be and whether we could do anything.
Hmmm... ProxyTopic... this topic is really about local IRC conventions, not IRC in general. I suppose that's implicit, but I'd prefer a locally novel name for it. Oh well. -- DanConnolly
I'm mostly a Linux users and xchat's the most productive IRC tool, multi server works well. There are also win32 and OSX versions that work just as well - no nagging to register. The other clients on win32 I've tried suck at multi server. For text only, irsii is pretty good if you can grok the key bindings. I tried chatzilla which although has handy click-url support, takes up too much screenspace and doesn't have key features such as logging. The multi-protocol IM clients such as as gaim handle IRC as a second-class citizen mostly and I wouldn't recommend them for sustained IRC. -- Dave Beckett
Changes to dancer, which powers irc.freenode.net
1 where's that cyc paper on how the ability ask clarifying questions raised NLP from 15% to 85% reliability?