I’d personally recommend just waiting for IRCv3. An early version is already live if you send the correct CAP request:
CAP REQ :twitch.tv/tags
And you’ll start getting tags similar to this on each message:
@color=#0000FF;emotes=16156:0-7;subscriber=1;turbo=0;user_type=mod :joe_user!joe_user@joe_user.tmi.twitch.tv PRIVMSG #somerandomchannel:lirikMLG is awesome!
Valid user types currently appear to be: staff, admin, global_mod, mod and no value. Broadcasters are either no value or mod depending on whether they modded themselves in their channel.
Keep in mind this is still really early and subject to unannounced changes. I’d recommend checking out #twitch-api on Freenode for more early tidbits about IRCv3.