I am going to make a substantiative post, rather than one of my usual pressure valve items (well, usual in recent memory).
I was reading this awesome article on /. about using CAPTCHA boxes to deal with OCR issues that have come up in the Internet Archive Project. For anyone not in the know, CAPTCHA boxes are those little things that make you type in letters or numbers in an image to make sure you are a human, and not a web spider.
I’ve got a different idea.
When google released zeitgeist, I became very interested in patterns in search activity. I even wrote a couple of nifty analysis algorithms for a data cube drill-down I’ve used on other data sets. Part of what I wanted to do was see if there was some way to harness the energy of what everyone was typing for a creative purpose.
I think that the opportunity to create a story – sort of like twitter, but with a different flavor, is being missed here. Create an open API that is pulling data in from google and several other aggregate sources (news headlines, what happened today in history, etc.) and use that to feed the CAPTCHA systems. People can either write the word in the image, or, they can write a sentence using the word. If they use the sentence, it gets re-amalgamated into a big story-soup for CC-licensed works to be built.
Another thought just occurred to me – make it a game. Mad Libs anyone?