Not sure for jabber. But for Google Talk it’s actually the same as for Fluther. Surround your text with the modifiers to style the string. Asterisks will make it bold, underscores will make it italicized, and dashes will make it strikethrough. * bold *, _ italics _, – strikethrough - I put a space before and after each word only because if I didn’t, it’d look like this: bold, italics, strikethrough link ; “link” : address (no spaces) GTalk might convert links automatically… it does when I use it, but I don’t know if a robot script will act the same. I hope that helps.