Comments enabled, thanks to reCAPTCHA
I've added a thing called reCAPTCHA to the comments on this weblog. I've generally left the comments closed because spammers tend to post a lot of junk which is a pain to sort through. reCAPTCHA is one of those systems where you have to type in a distorted word, something that's hard for computers to do.
But the really neat thing about reCAPTCHA is that half the words it presents is from a scanned book. It uses the correct answers people enter to put together the full text of books that the Internet Archive is trying to digitize. So every time you leave a comment now you're helping archive a book.
You can read more about reCAPTCHA and how it works. I was inspired to do this after reading the O'Reilly Radar post about reCAPTCHA. They mention that reCAPTCHA is used by over 20,000 web sites and is "the equivalent of over 2,000 people working 8 hours per day, 5 days per week."
Comments
Posting a comment with reCAPTCHA!
Posted by: Jonathan Blocksom | January 29, 2008 12:03 AM
I was lucky enough to see Luis von Ahn give a presentation in DC last winter (?) on reCAPTCHA and other "human computing" projects by him and his students at CMU. I think there are some videos of his talks floating around on the web.
Posted by: Sarah Elkins | January 29, 2008 02:41 AM
Hi Sarah! Thanks for posting. I see you're giving an XO presentation this weekend, I was wondering if that was on or not. I'll try to attend as well.
Posted by: Jonathan Blocksom | January 29, 2008 10:24 AM