IRC is and old and yet extremely rewarding protocol. I have been there, in various channels for around 3 years now and I have found great people, always willing to help. I have found some trolls also, but that is a minority, I think.
Let me put a real example:
16:40:19 < drio> Is there any way to move around between tabs without having to go one by one.... 16:41:52 < samuel-veyre> drio : was you around five minutes ago ? ... try gt3 to go to tab 3 for example. 16:42:37 < samuel-veyre> drio, :he tabpage
The question is, are you going to be able to remember all this gems. I don't, in some cases. I just use and then I forgot, unless I use it over and over again. Quicksilver to the rescue here.
Let's say you are in #ruby and #vim, create some files like:
$ ls -lac the_knowledge_pool/ total 8 drwxr-xr-x 5 drio staff 170 Aug 6 16:46 . drwx------+ 69 drio staff 2346 Aug 7 17:18 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 drio staff 0 Jul 25 10:17 ruby.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 drio staff 0 Jul 25 10:11 todo.txt -rw-r--r--@ 1 drio staff 0 Aug 6 16:46 vim.txt
Once that is done, make quicksilver load those files so you can access them easily. Then, when you get a gem from IRC, just use the "append to" in quicksilver to add the bits to the particular txt file.