If you've ever had to post transcripts and share information from a meeting/event, you know how much pain it is to come up with a structure that is still readable later. I usually end up spending hours concatenating sentences to make chat less shattered by random interjections. Well, no more pain!

I was extremely happy to see the new, little tool from Kisa Naumova – Chatlogs. Not only does it render your boring text-only transcript in colors, but it also has a neat graphical way of indicating speakers by pulling their SL profile picture into the web document. In addition, it allows you to use the Leeds Metropolitan University server to deposit your logs and tag them appropriately. This has the potential of creating a neat repository of open knowledge from all sorts of events.

(more after the break)

Now, some downsides:

1. It does occasionally take a long time for your chat to load. Even the one where I interviewed Kisa and only the two of us were present took about 3 minutes to come up.

2. Your profile pic may or may not be found. Mine wasn't initially, although I do have one in SL. Kisa was kind enough to do some back magic to help the system along.
   
   

3. You cannot edit your post once it's up. You can, however, bother Kisa and she will perform the edit for me until chatlogs gets an upgrade. Naturally, this approach doesn't quite scale.

Kisa plans on improving the current service and she appreciates your feedback. Another future direction being considered is a way for people not in SL to parse the chat taking place at an inworld event while it's happening.

While raw transcripts are not a replacement for those where a human being edits out the irrelevant content, this rendition at least makes them easier to consume. As far as I'm concerned, I plan on posting full interview transcripts connected to my posts on the Chatlog page from now on, in addition to my version of the story on SL Insider. Right now, here's the full conversation I just had with Kisa.