It has been a while since I've blogged. Once one gets out of the habit it seems so much easier to just let interesting things go, but this is just too cool. CAPTCHAs have been around for quite a long time. To a greater, or lesser degree they allow web site designers to classify visitors as human or bot. This is all very useful, but the people at CMU have come up with a very interesting twist. It seems that each day some 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved world wide by internauts requesting webmail accounts or leaving blog comments, etc. reCAPTCHA is a program that harnesses all that cognitive power to assist in converting paper only books into digital storage, with all the benefits that implies. Read about it here:
reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books
What is particularly cool is that you don't have to be a Web 2.0 maven to take advantage. With Mailhide, you give them an email address you want to have available on your web page or blog, they give you the HTML code to paste into your page. In my case it looks like this:
fla...@gmail.com
What you do with this code is limited only by you knowledge of HTML, but out of the box it works quite well. People (or bots) wanting your email address have to click on the ..., and solve the CAPTCHA.
Now Google's spam filters seem to be very good, and my ravings are not the center of the blogofractal, so spam isn't a problem. Even so, it only took me a few moments to hide my mail address, and I didn't have to change the look of my blog at all.
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