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 [...]
CogBlogged Tagged ‘webstorytelling’
Give and the Nets Giveth Back
Oh yeah, it does pay to give stuff away! Or at least to put half baked ideas “out there”. After just posting late last night about my crude 5 card flickr story demo I lamented the problems in code I had in easily getting random flickr photos from a given tag, John Krutsch emailed and offered some code to do what I needed more elegantly. I was going through gyrations to pull photos from an RSS feed, which meant I could only grab newer pix; John’s code scavenges all the photos by cleverly parsing the results of the flickr search results. I plunked in all his code and got all of the duct tape in place and was stunned that I did not have my usual round of 20 PHP typos in a row. It did work as advertised, though I notice every time it had to do the search, [...]
