We are All Cyber Monks
Can you imagine what it felt like to be one of those monks who were copying entire manuscripts by hand? It doesn't seem like the most appealing job, does it?
Well, I discovered today, thanks to another wonderful TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html) that we are actually all little cyber monks. Indeed, without even being aware of it, we are all contributing in the digitalisation of millions of books every year. How is that possible?
As you might have noticed, since three or four years ago, CAPTCHA's (the letters you have to type in websites to prove that you are human) evolved, taking on the shape of real words. You can read things like that:

So what happened? Did they just think that we were too stupid to copy meaningless series of words and signs? That's not the reason, but WHAT IS IT !!! Tell me pleaaase !!!
Well, one day some clever people were bothered by the fact that humanity is wasting a considerable amount of precious time each day to type millions of meaningless CAPTCHA's, and that there are millions of books which remain unavailable to the public because computers are unable to digitalise them. That's when their genius operated, and they thought, why not connecting the two, and making millions of internet users contribute to the digitalisation of entire books by just typing the CAPTCHA's they would type anyways? That's when CAPTCHA became ReCAPTCHA...

Now, thanks to a system that I don't understand, while spending a few dozens of seconds each day proving that we are human on websites such as facebook, twitter, or whatever else we are using (because honestly, who uses facebook and twitter! Huh???) we are actually participating in a "massiva scale online collaboration". Together, we are participating in the digitalisation of about 2.5 million books a year.
For the system to work, CAPTCHA's must be composed of two words, which sometimes gives funny combinations. A CAPTCHA on a liberal politician website read 'damn liberal', there was 'bad christians' on the embassy of God website, or still 'stoned founders', 'invisible toaster'...
The next thing? Translating the web while learning languages with duolinguo (http://duolingo.com/). With 1 million users, this website can translate the whole of wikipedia from english to spanish in just 80 hours. Isn't that INCREDIBLE?
Duolinguo