CogBlogged Tagged ‘insidethebox’

Thanks to a curious click form a Tony Hirst tweet, I briefly whizzed by xtranormal an interesting web app for creating/directing/producing/gaffering your own virtual movies: Xtranormal’s mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie-making, short and long, online and on-screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century and its democratization is a massive business opportunity. Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill—typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop. And all of this rang as 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story material. As I am preparing to do a remote online intro for Dean Shareski’s class this Monday, I am spiffing up the site and re-acquainting myself with old and new tools. After an hour’s play, [...]

My favorite example of collective intelligence producing something useful out of many ordinary actions is reCaptcha. Developed at Carnegie Mellon University, it provides web site owners free software and tools for providing graphical challenges in web forms that generate posting to web sites. By identifying two random words presented as images, web site users prove they are not software bots intended on insertion of spam links. This is nice, but the “hook” is that the words that appear are taken from a project of digitizing literature; one of the words is one that is ambiguous from the OCR scans. By humans authenticating themselves to publish to a web site, they are helping to digitize written works. Last week, while I think posting a comment to Brian Lamb’s blog, I was struck when the reCaptcha spoke to me: This was not random; it was a phrase, and I grew up in [...]