[uf-discuss] be it resolved: irc chat logs deserve their own microformat

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 2/1/06 8:05 PM, "Christopher St John" <ckstjohn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like to have a microformat for IRC chat logs. People publish
> them on the web with alarming regularity in a wide variety of
> formats, but it would be useful if they were consistently
> represented so that basic info (what said what when, and who
> entered and left the conversation at what point) could be more
> easily extracted.
> 
> Specifically, I'd like to be able to correlate, in space and time,
> many real-time events as captured on the web so that they
> can be played back later or observed from afar as a consistent
> set. IRC logs (presumably the backchannel of a conference
> session, but could be anything) are one thing it would be
> useful to capture.

<snip lots of good analysis>

Christopher,

I think I agree with most of your observations and analysis here, and I like
your statement of focus.

Your point about Kitta's example is a good one, in that, by simply copy and
pasting the text of the dialog, the time-stamped-essence was lost.

The only exception I might note, is that "automatic" IM logs (e.g. as
recorded by iChat, MSN IM, Adium) are remarkably similar to IRC chat logs
where there are only two people in the IRC channel.  Timestamps, messages
with authors, status messages (away, idle, etc.), are all there, just like
in IRC.  Thus I would hope that any solution could handle both cases, since
they are so similar.

Thanks,

Tantek