Printed Matters

Here’s a very cool thing that nicely illustrates the principle of leverage: reCAPTCHA.

It turns out that what you do when you decipher text in CAPTCHA mechanisms – you know, those images that blogs and forums throw at you during registration, to help prevent spam – is the very same thing that is needed to help in digitizing old books. So why not kill two birds with one stone: battle spam and help digitize old texts?

Can you think of an application of this for newspapers? Hint: think archives.