Prove you are human when commenting and help translate old books.

While moving this site to a new hosting provider this evening I added the reCAPTCHA Wordpress plugin to help control comment spam. reCAPTCHA’s tagline “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time” sums it up nicely.

The word images contain two words - one from a scan of old text that couldn’t be identified via OCR, the other is a verification word. If you match the verification word then we both know you are human and

they use your other word to translate the word that couldn’t be OCR’ed.
your comment gets added to my post

Nice!

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 blogging, human, ocr, sport

2 Comments to Prove you are human when commenting and help translate old books.

Any idea if the digitised versions of the books will be available on the internet? Its a great idea but I am concerned that its a private enterprise and the resulting digitised text might not be available to the public who helped create them, Unfortunately on dial up so couldn’t investigate in more detail.

amadan on November 3rd, 2007

It sounds like they are publishing texts via the Internet Archive - see http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

aehso on November 4th, 2007

What I'm Doing...

Smartest Guys in the Room (the Enron documentary) is astonishing. I wonder if there are more Enrons out there (outside banking that is!) 10 hrs ago
@paulca if the service and your id provider both support the OpenID Simple Registration Extension then it should work - http://url.ie/r4y 4 days ago
@paulca I've been to the recent meetups, good couchdb talk btw, will be at the next one too. Not yet taken getexceptional for a real spin... 4 days ago
@topgold Try Nassau St (3rd or 4th bus stop down) or outside Budget Travel on O'Connell St, routes 46*, 10*, 145)... 4 days ago
@desdublin Des, save yourself! I'll go for some pints+nosh with you! Or else promise to drive wherever you were jogging to! 5 days ago
More updates...