What do cats, dogs, and eBooks have in common? They can all help in the war against spam! Yes, it sounds strange, but I’m not kidding. Got two tools for you bloggers out there to consider adding to your blogs.
Most people know what Captcha is. Well, most people know what it does. It stands for, “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (thanks Wikipedia!) Essentially, it is a test to prove that the person signing up or posting the content is an actual human being and not some spam loving computer program. It does this by asking the human to identify something that a machine simply couldn’t do. For example, it might ask you to identify what letters appear in a twisted, stretched out graphic image.
Collectively, millions of captcha forms are being entered every day. A few clever people have tried to figure out how to harness that collective ‘manpower’ and use it for the forces of good and decency.
The first site to do this is reCaptcha. The only difference between a regular Captcha and a reCaptcha is that reCaptcha has you identify TWO words. One word it already knows and uses as verification. The other word actually comes from a scan of an eBook, and the computer can’t figure out what it is. So it’s relying on humans to take a look and type in what they think it is. If enough people all agree on what the word should be, then it makes a match! So every time you type in two words to confirm your comment, you’re actually using one word as verification, and supplying the reCaptcha project with information about another word the computers can’t figure out. So by posting comments to blogs, you can help the Internet Archive increase the accuracy of its scans. You can read more about the process here. reCaptcha is available for many platforms, including Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki and Movable Type.
The second method is called Assira, and it’s all about clicking on cute little pictures of cats and dogs. You and I can look at a picture of an animal, and it’ll take less than a second for us to determine whether we’re looking at a cat or a dog. However, a computer can analyze that data from here to eternity and still have trouble figuring it out. Well, some people over at Microsoft are partnering with Petfinder to create a very unique Captcha type device. It’ll show you 10 animals, and ask you to click on the cats. Takes about 2 seconds to do, and yet when you click submit you’re helping Petfinder classify a few of the 3 million photos of stray animals so they can try to find homes for them. Of course, you can adopt any of the pets that you see as well! And who doesn’t like looking at cute pictures of cats and dogs?
Personally, I’m thinking that I’m going to add reCaptcha to my blog once I can get a theme issue fixed. While I love the cats and dogs, it seems to take up a lot of space. Plus, I like the idea of helping out Internet Archive. They do some great work over there. But they’re both definitely worthy causes!
- Word Source: A Web 2.0 site that even the strict districts should allow
- Another Aiden video
- ChaCha, the search engine with a human touch
- NECC: Click here for Clicker
- Help too much or too little
Glenn Moses
9/17/2007
Steve – I’m trying to get reCaptcha to run on my wordpress site right now and I keep getting this socket error. I was going to ask how you got it to go, but I just you’re not running it. If you have any thoughts on getting reCaptcha going let me know. 
Steve
9/17/2007
I actually got it working, but it wasn’t pretty. It insisted on appearing to the right of hte comments box, which meant you had to scroll to see it. Couldn’t figure out how to make it appear above or below the comments box. Not done trying though.
I didn’t get any socket errors though. Worked fine for me.
Alecia Berman-Dry
9/20/2007
You know, I have filled in probably a hundred captcha boxes myself, but it took your blogpost to help me realize it could be a solution to a problem we’ve been having at my school. There are some spammers utilizing an online form in our admissions section and this could stop that from happening. Thank you for the perspective shift.
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptThe second method is called Assira, and it’s all about clicking on cute little pictures of cats and dogs. You and I can look at a picture of an animal, and it’ll take less than a second for us to determine whether we’re looking at a cat … [...]
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