The Amazing Power of the Internet - Information Age

I think it was Huxley in his book Third Wave he talked about people working for free. This is a clear example of that.

clipped from recaptcha.net Digitizing Books One Word at a Time clipped from recaptcha.net Type the two words:Type the eight numbers:Incorrect. Try again. The words above come from scanned books. By typing them, you help to digitize old texts. clipped from recaptcha.net reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books. About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books. reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.