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IRC in Times of Crisis

IRC has become a new medium for staying on top of really big breaking news. In 1993, when Russian lawmakers barricaded themselves inside the parliament building, some enterprising Muscovites and a couple of Americans set up a "news channel" on IRC to relay first-person accounts direct from Moscow. The channel was set up to provide a continuous loop of information, much like all-news radio stations that cycle through the day's news every 20 minutes. In 1994, Los Angeles residents set up a similar channel to relay information related to the Northridge earthquake. In both cases, logs of the channels were archived somewhere on the Net, for those unable to "tune in" live.

How would you find such channels in the future? Use the `/list' command to scroll through the available channels. If one has been set up to discuss a particular breaking event, chances are you'll see a brief description next to the channel name that will tell you that's the place to tune.

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