What a great idea!
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007I just came across the coolest idea for a web service I’ve seen in a long time. recaptcha.net is a free service to put CAPTCHA spam protection on your website.
What’s so cool about that you might ask?
Well the way the service can block spam bots from flooding your website with spam content is to ensure that the entered text is being supplied by a real person. The way this is done is by making the person enter some words that is unreadable by a computer program.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.
So your website visitors are helping the Internet Archive digitize books via OCR. Amazing.