Harnessing your spare brain cells

I recently ran across a news item about a creative use of the CAPTCHA utility. A computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon looked at the way CAPTCHA boxes work and thought that this ability of humans to recognize characters that machines can't read might be applicable in other situations. Just as the SETI@Home project harnesses computers' unused CPU cycles to search for signs of extraterrestrial life,  reCaptcha.net uses CAPTCHA boxes to get web users to help decipher scanned text that an optical character reader was unable to read.

I wonder what other cross-overs there are between the virtual world of electronic content and the real world, such as we know it. One that comes to mind is Second Life and the real-world entities that have a presence there. Now that we have retailers, news bureaus and libraries in Second Life, we can expect to see a closer relationship between the world of bytes and the world of atoms. Will SL libraries start providing access to real-world e-content? Will we see Dialog selling articles with Linden dollars, the virtual currency of Second Life?

Comments

[brianeisley]

I love the reCaptcha idea, and honestly, I wish there was some way to just sit and fill out a hundred or two boxes just to have fun and help digitize the content. But then, that would defeat the purpose of preventing spam.