Digital preservation crossover

Here's a cool idea to solve the problem of inadequate OCR technology and the need/desire to digitize the legacy of written culture.

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

In a nutshell, this project is digitizing public domain books for free use. They are then offering the words that the OCR can't recognize to websites that use those Spam-filter words (a CAPTCHA) to weed out bots and spam. Suddenly a human is passively volunteering to decipher a word that stumped the OCR software.

Good cause, I figure. If you have a website that uses a CAPTCHA look into whether you might want to and be able to help out.

Cheers

Novel Political Protest

Yann Martel wrote in the Globe this weekend about a group of artists being brushed off by the PM.

This is the action he has decided to take. I would categorize it as "Harassment by Literature". Should be entertaining for people who like literature, but don't like Harper.

http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/

Cheers