The little puzzles are CAPTCHAs - and everyone online has encountered them, at one time or other. These puzzles are a means to tell if there is a real person present or if it is a scanning program that is on the site. Undoubtedly, you have entered the letters and/or numbers and have been allowed to proceed with whatever task you wanted to do.

Now, researcher want to claim those few seconds from you and other people online. The cumulative time spent on these messages is staggering (150,000 hours per day - perhaps more). What the researchers want to do is to use your few seconds of time to encode books:

“Instead of wasting time typing in random letters and numbers, Carnegie Mellon researchers have come up with a way for people to type in snippets of books to put their time to good use, confirm they’re not machines and help speed up the process of getting searchable texts online.”

link: Web registration tool to encode books online

It is a clever idea of harnessing the efforts of the internet. With such projects, however, the question will become ‘what happens if you want to opt-out?’. Will netizens be given a choice?

Catherine Forsythe

[tags]encoding, books, ten seconds, captchas, netizens, internet, alpha numeric text, scanning programs, carnegie mellon[/tags]