Friday, September 5, 2008

reCAPTCHA Turns People Into Distributed Processors

reCAPTCHA is awesome and I'm shocked I haven't heard about it before. This is an absolutely brilliant example of distributing a little bit of work to many people in a socially productive way. Whomever is behind this is a genius and deserves a firm handshake.

In a nutshell, reCAPTCHA provides a free (!) captcha service to third party websites where the captcha pictures are scanned text from books. This turns every captcha lookup into a human driven OCR process. Absolutely awesome.

1 comment:

  1. I've been using wp-recaptcha for a couple of weeks, and it's a total success so far. Finally a solution that's both working (comparing to algorithmically generated captchas) and makes use of the human effort involved! Glad to see it gains momentum.

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