reCaptcha’ing

UPDATE: Whoops, I you know double clicked to select my reCAPTCHA private key - which selected the word, unfortunately it had a dash in it. So comments were not working for a bit there.. but looks good now.

So, I’ve been seeing reCAPTCHA around, most recently on Ask’s blog and decided to give it a whirl. I don’t get too much spam, or rather, not too much spam gets by Akismet on this blog, but it definitely happens periodically. Annoying. So I periodically toyed with looking for a captcha plugin but I kinda hate them. So often they’re so distorted I have difficulty figuring out the letters - perhaps it’s because I am half-machine. Who knows, but for whatever reason I’ve put it off.

However, this reCAPTCHA business seems cool - tieing in the digitization of books. So when you type in a reCAPTCHA you’re also acting as a better OCR for some scanned in text. If it catches on, presumably it means a lot more digitized text will hit the scenes and that seems like a darn good idea. They’re working with the Internet Archive so everything is Creative Commons and good like that.

So comment on knowing each comment serves the greater good - a very little, little, little bit - but hey, when’s the last time you did something for the greater good? Seriously, when? Comment it. :)

Sep 17th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: navel gazing