I don't have a problem with things I wrote being posted, but the idea of making transcripts of IRC public (and Google-able) after the fact makes me uneasy. I think that would have a chilling effect on people's willingness to participate in the media. There's a sense of ephemerality in IRC that allows people to "let down their hair" and not worry about exact phrasing. When you know you're writing "for posterity" it changes the dynamic considerably.

Liz. I agree, that sort of why I'm asking here. I should probably have put something in the topic heading saying that it would be published. It's just that looking at the logs... there some really funny and great stuff there so it would be neat to share.

I guess another option would be to put it in a directory that had a .robot file telling google to go away...

Hmmm...

This still seems so funny to me. You know how around the Renaissance, which in part happened thanks to the printing press (where people started writing in ernest, and for greater percieved posterity), you had the aristocracy/learned types walking around all self-important with all kinds of pageantry and incredibly strict concerns for decorum and presentation and how things seemed. Victorianism is the extreme example...

WELL, all you folks who worry about your "ephemeral, unexact phrasing" being Googled and made "available to posterity" don't seem to really get it.

WE are human beings. We think thoughts. We who blog and who chat and who pour ourselves into the Internet, make our thoughts, our minds, a part of it.

Nevermind that the form and quality of your english grammar is irrelevant, every bit as much as your ego/id. All that matters are your thoughts and ideas.

You are either in or out. Anything you say in a public environment (be it in IRC or the kitchen at a party), is never ephemeral because it is etched in other people's memories anyways. Google is merely a web-based memeory. Same diff.

I can understand your positions, but I tell you now they won't hold. ;)

I only made one comment in the IRC session, but I'm OK with it going public on the Web.

So I got some private comments too... I will not publish the logs. Next time I will make it clear up front that the logs will be published.

My reason for not posting the logs is primarily because I doubt most people thought they were going to be published and I think that's bad practice.

Since we are talking about IRC:

[09:07] [adamhill] Bopuc++
[09:07] [jibot] bopuc has 9 points now

Does Google have a notion of the past, before the last Googledance? If not, then our linchpin is a lot like the protagonist in 'Memento'.

Has any search engine been doing research into a continuous history?

Adam - have a look at the recall search at the internet archive. It tracks searches over time.