Occasional Links: May 24th, 2007

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CAPTCHA with social entrepreneurship twist: reCAPTCHA – This service provides the usual CAPTCHA spam-protection, but adds on it by putting two words in the image instead of just one. One is a word the computer already knows, and the other is a word from a book being digitized. So while your visitors are helping you prevent spam, they’re taking an extra 1.5 seconds to help bring books into the digital age.

Luis von Ahn and myself estimated that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, this is over 160,000 human hours per day (that’s about 19 years). Harnessing even a fraction of this time for reading books will greatly help efforts in digitalizing books.

reCAPTCHA provides an easy to use API for putting CAPTCHAs on your site. Installing is as easy as adding a few lines of code to your HTML and then making a HTTP POST request to our servers to verify the solution. We also wrote plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, and phpBB to make it very easy to integrate.

Virtual Worlds getting 50 million users by 2011? – GigaOM has the key points of Gartner press release concerning the growth of virtual worlds like Second Life and Habbo Hotel. It describes this revelation as “a wake-up call to the CIO and CEOS out there that this is not a game, just sort of messing around.” Which is interesting to me, because that’s precisely what most virtual worlds are, just a game. World of Warcraft is the most popular online virtual world out there, and there isn’t exactly a large opportunity for marketing promotions within it, unless your business wants to start sponsoring raids. More free-form virtual worlds like Second Life will still only have a fraction of the fraction of internet users in virtual gaming worlds.

ComScore puts the number of unique US users logging in to Second Life at least once in 2007 at 207,000. And most of the growth in virtual worlds is more likely to come from younger users adopting them in their childhood and continuing to participate in more mature virtual worlds as they age. GigaOM covered a piece of this themselves, as did Business 2.0.