Avi,

> Yes, I've had this idea in the back of my head for a while.  I'd like to
> combine this with two things:
> - multiple feeds into the wiki: not just chat but also mailing lists,
> commit logs, issue tracking, etc
> - a simple markup system so that you can, during a chat, say something
> like "topic: foo", and have the rest of the chat logged to a particular
> wiki page.  Of course, this same markup would be recognized in any of the
> other feeds as well.  Ideally it would also have conventions for referring
> directly to certain revision numbers, bug numbers, etc (see CVSTrac for a
> nice example of this).

Those are good ideas. A couple of comments:
As you probably have heard, NASDAQ (a United States stock exchange) requires
brokerage houses to keep IMs that are generated for 3 years.  The idea of
'persistent' chat will spill into all other areas of 'privileged
communications, such as the health system, drug companies, law firms etc. In
other words, you have to keep track of chats persistently for all intents
and purposes.

So the idea is this: In addition to adding a marker to the stream itself to
direct it to the wiki, you would provide a 'TIVO' like function for the chat
stream. [For the uninitiated, TIVO is a TV to hard disk recorder]. This
function would allow you to 'rewind' through the chat, mark it from where
you want to grab it from (skipping commercials of course :), and then insert
it into the wiki for you, with an option to keep logging if need be.

I notice that what happens a lot during our own chats here is that we start
chatting, a discussion starts, and there's a bit of the discussion (or a
whole lot) that we want to save. The described mechanism of 'marking and
logging' may be a little late in the game to save the good bits. Because you
probably have to log everything in the chat anyway on the server (even if by
default you don't save it), you should be able to roll back to an arbitrary
point in the chat, and command that part to go to a given wiki page.

One the clever things about Babble/Loops is that all chats are persistent
and are associated with a room. Basically you start a chat in a room, the
entire chat 'stays' there.  Thus you can 'look back' on entire
conversations, even though they may have taken place over a long period of
time. Members jump from room to room and remain within the context of the
ongoing discussions in the room. The result is a 'Asynchronous synchronous
discussion', where you can chat with a person that is on the channel with
you, but also you can go to a channel by your lonesome and add text. This is
similar to IM plus a discussion forum, though in a different format.
Categorization then is 'by room', e.g. the Morph room, the Seaside room, the
Swiki room, all living in the 'Squeak Discussion Area'. Of course,
Babble/Loops has many more interesting features; this is just one small
aspect. After all, David N. Smith is a smart guy, I recall that he built the
initial prototype in Smalltalk :-)

>From my understanding, in Babble you typically cannot go back and edit the
chats themselves. You bring up a good point about the 'refactoring wiki
browser', where you need to edit the chats once you get them to the wiki
page. However that it's still a better alternative to how it's already being
done.

Jim Benson