Touring - Tourist IRC Channel?

I'm wondering if any of you guys are on IRC. I've been in IRC channels for many years and am yet to find a cycling oriented and specifically a touring oriented channel. If any body knows of such a channel I'd love to know about it. In order to get the ball rolling I created a channel on synIRC which is a very reliable and easy to use network with good services.

If you don't know what IRC is it stands for Internet Relay Chat and is one of the oldest forms of chat online. There is some info about it at This Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat). Common IRC clients for Windows are mIRC, pIRCh, and Chatzilla (firefox plugin).

The channel is #biketour at the server irc.synIRC.net
irc://irc.synIRC.net:6667/biketour

I'm wondering if any of you guys are on IRC. I've been in IRC channels for many years and am yet to find a cycling oriented and specifically a touring oriented channel. If any body knows of such a channel I'd love to know about it. In order to get the ball rolling I created a channel on zirc which is a very reliable and easy to use network with good services and great ircops.

There's a chat channel accessable from bikejournal.com. I don't think it's specifically touring related, but you could probably start a discussion there.

My view on chatrooms/IRC channels generally is that they're great for wasting time if you don't have much else to do, but don't really serve any other purpose. All of the questions and answers (which don't really change that much anyway) are better asked on a forum like this so that they can attract a greater variety of responses from people who log in over time, rather than just whoever happens to be online at the time. That seems to be the route most people go down, so chat rooms tend to just fill up with idle chatter. Personally, I don't spend enough time online to get any real value from them.

I understand what you're saying about chat's being great for wasting time. I fully agree that forums and websites are a much better way for information. I have plenty of free time on my hands thanks to snow covered roads so I sit on IRC quite a bit, usually with nothing happening. I'm just hoping that there may be some people with similar cycling interests as bored as I am that might want to just chat about our interests. After posting this someone joined the channel within a couple minutes so I'm assuming there has to be some people around here that are nearly as bored as I am at times.

We are now at irc.undernet.org #cycling