Friday, April 25, 2008

reCAPTCHA

Those of you who run your blogs independently should really consider replacing your normal CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) with reCAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA uses people's responses to their CAPTCHAs to help transcribe old books to text format. Unlike the image formats that you often find old books in (the pdf copies and such), the texts resulting from reCAPTCHA can be copy & pasted and ctrl-F'ed (not to be confused with "F'ed up").

I bring this up for two reasons. First, I've been meaning to for a while, especially since I strongly support their goal, and seriously wish that all my books were compatible with the ctrl-F feature. Second, I just discovered that stumble upon uses reCAPTCHA, which pleases me greatly. I hadn't realized that reCAPTCHA was well enough known to catch the attention of the folks at Stumble.

I would use it myself if I didn't host this blog on Blogger. Speaking of which, how 'bout we switch over to reCAPTCHA, guys?