Kevin Marks posted yesterday about the Social botware in the Joi Ito IRC channel where I have been hanging out the last couple days. The bots make things very interesting.

I know IRC is ancient, but some things seem to have brought it into vogue (not sure what exactly—for me, the convenience of having ChatZilla built-in to my Mozilla browser helped).

At the moment, I have the chat window open and Cory Doctorow is chatting / debating with a bunch of folks about the history and evolution of copyrights in the US. It is a good example of what is great about chat—lots of fast and free thoughts and comments.

Unfortunately, this conversation will probably all be lost unless the chat get archived and edited into a usable form (reading old chat transcripts is only occasionally worth the effort, IMHO). But, it is definitely social.