Two birds, one stone 2.0

Recently I’ve purchased a few concert tickets via Ticketmaster. After the second or  third time I noticed that the random letters I was asked to enter before checkout, were actually not random – they were in fact two words. Well, at least they made the security annoyance easier for us humans, I thought.

A few days after this, my NPR podcast explained it is actually part of a bigger plan (love how kismic my NPR podcast is to my life). In short, libraries and newspapers are digitizing their collections by scanning in the materials and having a computer read the scans. In some cases the computer can’t actually translate the word.

So now – we’re helping them do their work. While you are checking-out at Ticketmaster, you are being presented with two words, one of those is actually a word that the computer couldn’t read from the scan. Once a number of people identify that image as the same word – it is entered into the document being digitized. So simple – so cool.

To read more about how this all works, check out the story here >>