I've set up a free chat room as a lot of folks were having trouble accessing IRC. Please join us at http://wwwl.meebo.com/room/netsquared/

Project Champion and Open Source Advocate-at-Large, Chris Messina (pictured here) has set up a non-IRC, but IRC-like backchannel using PIbb here: http://pibb.com/go/n2y2

You'll need an OpenID, but you can get one from http://myopenid.com.

So several NetSquared sessions are running using Gabbly.  That's great for me (believe it or not, I don't have an IRC client at my fingertips), and I also figured out how to create a chat room on the fly for further random conversations.  Just set up a Gabbly page on any URL - obviously, you probably want to use a NetSquared URL if talking about this conference.  See the example below:

 http://gabbly.com/http://www.netsquared.org/smokinggoat

Unfortunatley, Gabbly doesn't seem to support private messages.  Any ideas?  (Yes, besides, downloading an IRC client....  ;-))