Chatting on the Internet can be fun. It’s a great place to meet like-minded people, and sometimes you can even be lucky and find practical places to get advice or professional tips – that’s if you know where to look! Different chat rooms target different types of people, including men, women, the young and the old, all races, religions and occupations – from business professionals to housewives.
What is an Internet ‘chat room’?
Your average chat room is an ‘open discussion’ forum. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, any Internet user can log on to a website with an inter-active chatting facility and enter a chat room. You usually need to sign up as a member or log in with a guest username. Many people choose to be creative in order to maintain secrecy of their identity, but depending on the type of chat room you are in, this may or may not be appropriate.
If anyone else happens to be logged on simultaneously then those people can exchange lines of text, thus creating a ‘live’ chat room. You chat to someone else simply by typing in lines of text and pressing ‘send message’. The chat room will instantly add your text line message to the main screen with your chat room identity to the left. The chat rooms get more interesting when there are experts online at various times of the day to offer friendly advice or to answer your questions.
What chat rooms are the most popular?
One of Australia’s most popular chat rooms is in fact, the chat room of Channel 9’s 60 Minutes program. Directly after the program ends, 60 Minutes offers viewers the opportunity to go online and chat with a guest ‘speaker’.
If you are curious as to the topics discussed in previous weeks across the live chat rooms, you can select the ‘online chat’ from the archives in the left-hand index. Previous hosts include Nikki Webster, the Olympic child star whose chat room was extremely popular; Rodney Fox, who discussed the pros and cons of swimming in Australian waters with sharks; and 19-year-old quadriplegic Tim McCallum with his guide dog, Buster.
If you are hunting for some great chat rooms to talk to a so-called ‘expert’, or perhaps even to communicate with people all over the world who have similar interests to your own, check out these websites and their chat rooms.
www.thelounge.com.au
