Archive for November, 2007

11.27.07

Approve Blog Comments to Save Our Literary Heritage?

Posted in Learning at 11:34 am by Chris Champion

I’m sure nearly everyone who reads blogs knows about the strategy for filtering spam from blog comments by asking users to type the text in a picture.

I’m not sure everyone knows about Project Gutenberg – the project to digitize all of our world’s classical literature… basically old books are fed into computers who digitize the text and then try to convert it to words. The problem is that much of the text is old, and the computer can’t always figure it out:

image credit: reCAPTCHA (see below)

So… I don’t remember where I read it first… but there are organizations that are working to help decipher the text. I’m sure everyone who can read English can reasonably decipher the text above – so why not have people help decipher the scans?

I’ve just installed a WordPress plugin called reCAPTCHA – whenever you comment on this blog, you’ll be asked to verify someone’s interpretation of the scanned text. Pretty cool, huh?

Learn more about reCAPTCHA and the OCR/literature movement here.

11.19.07

Where Have You Been?

Posted in Learning at 12:00 pm by Chris Champion

That last comment about cake was not just some incomparable post.  I didn’t say to myself, “self, you can’t go more than that”.  But after reading a post from Will Richardson on his blog, I realized that I’ve been following the read-write “web”… its just not been so much “web” and more like “social network”.  In fact, I feel like I’ve been living in a line by line play in Web 2.0 fashion… on Twitter.

I’m sure I’ll have something critical to say… but for now:

http://twitter.com/chrischampion

And its RSS fed, so feel free to indulge… or if you read this and you don’t subscribe to my Twitter feed, please do.