web

ReCaptcha: The smartest way to deal with something annoying

Spam, zombie robots, and the rest of the dark underbelly of the Internet has led to one of the Web's big annoyances: the captcha. That's the barely readable block of random letters you must translate in order to prove your humanness, and it's supposedly the one thing that separates us from the machines. It's also used in nearly every site registration process--and more recently at site logins. The bottom line is that it's annoying but also utterly necessary to keep evil at bay.

Enter reCAPTCHA, a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. A mix between disease-curing Folding@Home, and MyCroft [review], reCAPTCHA requires users to solve two jumbled words: one is the actual captcha, the other is just a word that needs to be translated into text. These words come from various scanned books and documents residing on the Internet Archive. Many of those books were written before computers and in their current state (PDFs and image files) are just glorified photographs--a medium that is still hard to sort through. Once complete, they'll be digital text, and completely searchable.

Words for translation are not just chosen by random. Documents that have been scanned, get checked by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, which is able to pick up many of the words. Those that are misspelled by OCR, or are impossible to read, are plucked and put into the ReCaptcha word pool. Sites can implement ReCaptcha several ways. There are plug-ins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, and PHP.

I've embedded a sample ReCaptcha below. You'll notice both words look similar, as ReCaptcha is using both words from the same source, so you can't tell which one has already been solved.

Related: inChorus [review]

[found on del.icio.us]… Read more

Cisco's John Chambers preaches Web 2.0 gospel

From ZDNet:

At the Interop conference in Las Vegas, Cisco CEO John Chambers talks about the need for businesses to increase productivity by implementing Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, mashups, and virtual conferencing. He also explains how Cisco used Web 2.0 principles in its $7 billion acquisition of Scientific Atlanta.

Box.net rolls out Microsoft Office Web storage plug-in

Box.net is beta testing a new plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets users save Office files to their Box.net storage folders. The plug-in works for both Office 2003 and 2007 on Windows XP and Vista, provides users a new "Save to Box.net" button, and gives visual notification when the file is uploading and then successfully sent. Users can then access that file anytime on their Box.net Web storage folder.

The new plug-in was built using Box.net's developer API, which the Box.net team says can be used to add this functionality to … Read more

Wussy CEOs hide on their own Web sites

Josh and I just spent the better part of two days finding e-mail contacts for the products that were nominated for the Webware 100 awards. Many nominations came from people not affiliated with the companies that made these products. Fans, in other words.

To these fans, I say, thanks for taking the time to nominate the products you like. But to nearly all companies that have the fans, I blow loud and wet raspberries in your general direction. Do you have any idea how freaking hard it was to find contact information for you?

In far too many cases, there … Read more

U.K. judge stumped by Web lingo

If you're reading this, then the chances are pretty good that you know what a Web site is. So go tell it to the judge.

The man you'd want to speak to is Judge Peter Openshaw, who's presiding at Woolwich Crown Court in London over a trial in which three men stand charged with inciting terrorism over the Internet. According to a Reuters account of Wednesday's proceedings, Openshaw interrupted questioning to get a basic vocabulary check.

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is,&… Read more

Rough start for Truemors site

Truemors, a new social information site from former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, went live this week, but has suffered some early growing pains.

The site is sort of a combination of Twitter and Digg; users can phone, text or e-mail in rumors, and they're posted to central page. Then other users can vote them up or down.

While the launch of Truemors was widely anticipated, opening day didn't go entirely well. Spam posts quickly appeared on the main site, and bloggers wondered whether its lack of focus would hinder its ability to find a community.

Blog community response: … Read more

Nielsen: Web 2.0 slacking off on design principles

Danish usability consultant Jakob Nielsen earned his unofficial title of "Web usability guru" as an early promoter of standardized Web design. You can thank him, in part, for blue links. He prompted a lasting, vocal debate by distinguishing between print and online approaches to eye appeal, readability and writing style. (For example, see "History of print standards.")

Unafraid of controversy, he continues to tout astonishing concepts such as "Why you only need to test with five users" and is known for his strong--some would say "extreme"--opinions on minimalism and uniformity.

BBC News on Monday published an article detailing Nielsen's new call … Read more

Falwell Web foe tempers critiques with sympathy

In his lifetime, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell had no shortage of critics, both in the offline and online worlds--and over the years, some in the latter category found themselves caught in his legal crosshairs over domain names resembling his own.

One of the higher-profile Web spats involved Christopher Lamparello, a thirtysomething gay man in New York. Since 1999, Lamparello has owned the Fallwell.com Web site, which housed articles aimed at contradicting the televangelist's antigay views. A few years ago, Falwell sued him, claiming the domain name's spelling was too close to that of his official Web … Read more

WordPress wizard talks to CNET's Webware

Matt Mullenweg is officially the CEO of Automattic. Please note the double "t"--as in "Matt." But he's really the guy who brought WordPress to the world and oxygen to the blogosphere.

You can see the first half of this Webware interview here. Matt explains why WordPress is open source but his antispam kismet isn't. He discloses the catalytic role his mother played in his software development. And he talks about blogging in places where the government is out to get you. The second part of the interview will be available online soon.

Web 2.0 gets schooled

This afternoon, I went over to NYC's Cooper Union to sit in on the final project presentations for the Web 2.0 Paradigms class, a hands-on course in the school's electrical engineering department taught by adjunct professor Sanford Dickert. In this course, the students--who were required to have software development experience--created their own Web applications from start to (very beta) launch, with a focus on the end user experience and what kinds of consumers would use such a service.

Here's Webware's recap of the four products that were demonstrated--a fifth team had been working on developing … Read more