2010년 7월 2일 Five Years of Some IRC Channel
As some of you know I used to run my own IRC channel since 2004 (well, not strictly “my own”, but formally I assumed that role) and kept a log of the channel since September 2005. After I see Dominic Szablewski’s excellent visualization of 9 Years of Sleep, I decided to make my own picture.
Compared to Szablewski’s one, my log is comprehensive as I use an irssi proxy to keep my connection and it results in the following dense picture: (Click to enlarge.)
While the pattern inside it is not so obvious at the first glance, you can see a repetitive pattern of seven-day cycle after some inspection. Moreover it shows a great shift of active time zone in early 2007: persons didn’t start to talk before 12 PM in 2005, but they started to talk at 9 AM in 2007. It can be explained by the fact that key people in the channel became the university student at that year. Also note that the density of the chat log peaked around early 2008 — that is also a moment that the number of users peaked at 60+ persons. (That have been reduced to 40+ persons now.)
I have a bunch of ideas that can be made from my collection of chat logs. For example, the separate picture can be made from logs of each persons or keywords. (The former is not that simple since many persons tend to use two or much more nicks; someone even managed to use estimated 400+ nicks for years.) Or we can make a graph between users calling them. I even generated a random chat log from the historic logs and made fun of it. That’d be just a matter of time.
