by Marcus Stenbeck 29.November 2007 09:52
While checking out the registration page at Satisfaction Inc. for their mention on Microformats.org, I stumbled upon what I think must be one of the single most clever ideas ever; reCAPTCHA. Yes, I'm including Mac 'n Cheese in that list too...
For those who do not know what CAPTCHA is - it is a method, or a program, that determines if the its user is a computer or a human. Most of us use one of these program every day when registering for new services, or posting messages of the internet. Below is an example of a CAPTCHA.
The cool thing about reCAPTCHA is that they figured since people read these, supposedly unreadable by a computer, images - why not make good use of that time to, say, digitizing books that were written before the computer age?
With their little tool you are presented with two words, like in the image above, and you are supposed to read and type out what both of them are. One of the words is a known word to the computer - that way it can determine if you read it right - and the other word is a word that the automatic text deciphering programs (OCR) weren't able to read correctly. If you typed out the first word correctly it's assumed that you also typed out the second word right, and your answer is then stored along with everyone else's answer to the same word.
So, if you are using some form of CAPTCHA already on your site I urge you to contribute to our society by using reCAPTCHA... or at least take a look at recaptcha.net.