Plurk, it’s all the buzz. What have you heard? How it’s the cool new chat tool? How it’s got a neat creature? Or how Karma rules the roost? But have you heard about the chat parser?

Parser? Yes, it’s what runs over and processes the words you type in your plurk or comment. It turns your text into rich goodness, and you didn’t even know it. Let’s look at some of the obvious ones.

**this** becomes **this**

*this* becomes *this*

__this__ becomes this

Pretty nifty huh? Well there’s a few more tricks in there. The next two are nifty and less obvious.

In the chat window to create a plurk, there are several options, such as says, and wishes. There is also freestyle. The last allows you to type any text. What happens if you type says or wishes though? You get the plurk version just as if you’d selected it.

The next one is about linking someone’s name. If you want to link tojosan for example, simply putting an @ in front does the trick.

tojosan with an @ at front becomes tojosan. The @ disappears.

Did all of that overwhelm you? Well here’s a final trick for sharing URLs without having that overly long string in there. It’s another markup trick. Here we go.

URL[space](link text)

ex http://amazon.com (Amazon – The online store) becomes Amazon – The online store

ex http://plurk.com (Plurk – your life on the line) becomes Plurk – your life on the line

The key is to type out the URL then a space, followed by a (, then the link text you want, then close with a ). Go ahead, try a few. It’s easy once you see it.

As a shortcut, this also works www.plurk.com (The Plurk) becomes The Plurk.

So there you have it, a bag of Plurk goodness to play with in your chats. Go forth and chat with gusto. Come back and share your tips and tricks with the rest of us.

Happy plurking!

So this person adds me as a contact on ooVoo of all places. I just figured ’she’ was another one of my Twitter contacts that found me there.  Today she started a text chat with me on ooVoo, introducing herself as Brena.  She said she worked for Unicef.

Well the chat progressed and we were making small talk about our jobs, where we live and how are days were.  Then she wants to go to IM since she has no camera.  I should have realized something was up then.  My Twitter buds are too smart to join something like ooVoo with no web cam.

Anyway, so we go to Yahoo chat. (i’ll shorten the story from here.) So then the next thing I know she’s sending me an email to my Yahoo account.  Which she insisted I check for it.  While I’m checking the mailbox, she starts telling me she’s really not in the US, but over seas in West Africa somewhere.  Working of course.  (I’d so figured it out this was a scam by this point.)

So I got the email and it’s four pictures of some blond woman.  Semi provocative but all were clothed though.  Safe for kids eyes.  But what the heck? Sending me those  types of pictures was certainly not invited.  Then it comes. She asked me about banking.  When I said that was none of her business, her come back was that I just didn’t understand her need.  She was in need and stuck in Africa.

While she chatted at me, I was busy blocking and removing her from my contacts.  The last one was on ooVoo, only because I’m slow, and after we got cut off otherwise, she sent one last message there.  Asking me why I dropped her.  Needless to say, blocked now there too.

I’m telling you because this is the first direct person to person scam I’ve had someone try on me over the internet.  Yeah, I was a scam virgin, but it was oddly voyeuristic on my part.  It was like watching some strange animal try to feed through some strange ritual.  I almost felt a pang at letting this critter go without poking and prodding it too see just what made it tick.

Well, perhaps another time.  But for you, watch for someone named Brena(something) and be wary of her ‘friendship’.  May all of your online friends at least be friendly.