Join Us in #redmonk

Well, someone’s bucking for a promotion. After mentioning the possibility of a RedMonk IRC channel in yesterday’s post, 24+ hours later I discover that Cote’s already got it implemented. For the record, I *love* having Cote around.

Anyhow, as far as we can tell, we meet Freenode’s on-topic usage guidelines, so as of tomorrow the two of us will officially begin killing time in #redmonk on Freenode. We don’t really know what – if anything – to expect, but feel free to drop by for a.) water cooler chat, b.) open source etc chat, or c.) some free answers to questions plaguing you.

Now many of you will have little or no idea what IRC is, and that’s totally cool. Our developer audience already does, but few of the rest of you are likely to have had occasion to use it. So for the crowd of folks out there for whom IRC is just another confusing three letter acronym, think of it like a semi-permanent IM chatroom. Luis‘s old employer the Berkman Center has a pretty good HowTo for IRC that might be a good place to start, and those of you who are Firefox users can grab the Chatzilla extension for an IRC client here. I’ll also try and do a screencast with Istanbul if I can get it to work (so far, the videos it generates kill both Totem and VLC).

We hope to see you in IRC whenever you’ve got a minute or two; it’d be great to get some our extended community interacting more directly with each other – you never know who might stop by.