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

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

Nice!