If you're a frequent denizen of the Interwebz--and if you're here, I know that you are--you may have recently encountered (and been annoyed by) a verification widget while using a website. A verification widget is that pesky box with words or data that you must type in correctly (even though it's all mashed together and there's the Web equivalent of paint splatter and debris strewn across it) to verify that you're a human and not a bot. See the image below, for example. The purpose of this exercise is to cut down on infuriating spam (the electronic kind, not the meat, per se) in forums, e-mail, social networking sites, etc.
Google offers one of these anti-bot services for free, called reCAPTCHA. If you type words into the reCAPTCHA verification widget, you're actually helping to digitize books and probably saving the planet somehow!
"About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books."Learn more about reCAPTCHA here.
