Monday, December 3, 2007

irc bot archiving

so /. picked up this story about this company which uses irc bots to lurk on irc rooms and record everything everyone says, and then makes it indexable and such...

i am far to lazy to go dig around to prove it, but i don't think these are the first guys in this game... i've been googling solutions to really obscure tech stuff at least 3 or 4 times in the past and i've come upon results which seemed to be irc-ish chatlogs...

basically, the log is just a txt style web page using the familiar irc "username: comment" format... as i scroll through the google cache looking for the highlighted keyword, i'm reading the conversation and it's just ppl chatting about misc stuff... not a page, not a blog, just a record of some conversation which happened to contain keywords that i was searching for and get ranked in the first few pages so i found it...

anyone else seen this?

2 comments:

Jens "jdm" Meyer said...

I've seen it too. Never really thought about it too much. Goes to show, if you run an irc channel you should manage connecting users.

rwnin said...

and/or watch what you say when in irc (or on the inet, or on the phone) and assume somewhere someone is listening and recording ;)