Gregory Todd Williams

There’s an article by Clay Shirky over on OpenP2P called In-Room Chat as a Social Tool that gives a nice summary of the interesting affects of using chat software as a second arena of conversation a face to face meeting of approximately thirty people.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real room. … Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.

One of the things that occured to me while reading the article (and remembering how much time I used to spend on irc) was that there should be an irc client that instead of bottom-scrolling when the window fills up should wrap around to the top of the window. As each line appeared, the text X lines before it (where X is slightly less than the height of the window) would fade out slightly. This all would solve one huge problem that I was always frustrated with in irc: trying to select text with the mouse in a very active channel. This was nearly impossible in clients where everything shifted up one line every couple of seconds (or even several times a second).

The need to scroll backwards through the chat log might necessitate having some sort of toggle between bottom-scrolling and wrap-around-scrolling, but that doesn’t seem like a show-stopper to me.