As you must know, some sites require you to translate a distorted word and type it in when leaving comments, to filter out spambots. The guy who helped create that system "realized that he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles."
It could be defended as a small cost and necessary evil, but he decided that surely all that power could be harnessed for something useful. So he reinvented it.
If you've visited those sites [e.g., Facebook], your squiggly-letter-reading ability has been harnessed for a massive project that aims to scan and make freely available every out-of-copyright book in the world, by deciphering words from old texts that have stumped scanning software.For example, through this effort, every issue of the New York Times, back to 1851, will be digitized by the end of the year! Which just goes to show, the sum of those small costs was very large, indeed.
This reminded me of another fascinating application that I learned about from a former professor of mine, the excellent Panos Ipeirotis. In his class, he mentioned the esp game, a very clever way to get real people to label images for free. Google licenses the game to improve searches on its millions of images.
As with fuzzy words, people interpret pictures better than computers. Both of these applications struck me as being like manual grid super-computing networks.
No wonder, then, that I later came to learn that both applications were created by the same guy, Luis von Ahn. I also came to learn, through my professor's blog, that von Ahn has recently started a blog. Full of interesting ideas, no doubt. We are in the golden age of information!
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