24 July 2007

recaptcha or Captcha meet wisdom-of-crowds

Got a beta invite to polarrose ("The Polar Rose browser plugin lets you discover who's in any public photo") and got sidetracked by a link while reading the polarrose blog to recaptcha.net


Love the idea behind reCaptcha, the service generates Captcha's from failed OCR at the internet archive;

"eCAPTCHA 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. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly."

Apparently reCaptcha were conceived by Luis von Ahn who also happens to be the man behind Google Image labeler.

I've registered an account at recaptcha.net and will definitely use this service on a forthcoming website I'm working on.

reCaptcha offers a free captcha email protection service also at mailhide.recaptcha.net. Think I will reCaptha my email adresses instead of using this javascript email address obscuring script from projecthoneypot

Note, did find the audio version of reCaptcha a bit difficult to hear ...... glad I can read

Great example of utilizing wisdom-of-crowds to provide a real service. Nice tagline they got "stop spam - read books"

The polarrose service I'll blog about when I've got time to play around with the service

1 comments:

Mikael said...

Would be great if you could invite me. My email is my blogger-alias at gmail.com (and my blogger-alias would be s**ken with pi instead of the asterisks).