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.

Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheddar

Wow, as Tom McMahon put it, "my heart attack just had another heart attack".

Telescopic Text

Joe Davis has an excellent exercise in exploration and expansion of concepts. You must check out Telescopic Text.