Remember when you used to type a search term into Google and get a little block back with a single link to each website?

Nowadays, Google go to extreme lengths to understand the structure of a site and give popular shortcuts in its own results, as in the example for the Royal Mail in this post. You could argue that this is amazingly friendly and helpful of Google, but I wonder if it’s based on the number of times people get to a website and find it almost impossible to figure out where to go next.

Imagine, I type “Royal Mail” into Google, click on the link and try to find their business services. If the site was badly broken (which it isn’t) I could have trouble finding them from that landing page. My guess is that this great Google feature has grown out of the sheer number of websites where that second click question is such a mystery for the poor users.

Which is a terrible shame, really.

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Lots of people have problems with spam, in their email, but web developers also have problems with people putting garbage into websites. I get a lot of comments from spammers who are trying to get links to their websites onto my blog. We get computer programs trying to win (by cheating) competitions we have created for our clients.

One of the solutions to that has always been the tedious email verification, login, password thing, which is too much if you just want someone to comment on your blog. Captcha is another solution, and I’ve just discovered (thanks to O’Reilly again for this) a brilliant spin on Captcha.

What is Captcha? It stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and it means putting something on screen that a robot or a piece of software can’t (easily) get past. The most common thing to do is to display an image containing some letters and numbers, and ask the user to read it and type in what it says. If you mess with the formatting enough, it becomes pretty much impossible for a piece of software to read something that’s easy for most of us people. So there are still some things we do better than computers…

reCaptcha takes that a step further. They’re using it to test and correct scans from documents, to check the scans, and to make better scanning software. They display the results of document scanning to a bunch of users, and the majority answer turns out to be the right one. A by-product of this is that it allows us to check that we have a human in front of the web page.

This must be one of those things that separates geeks from the rest, but I just love the elegance of this. Google has its image tagging game, which is slowly tagging all the pictures on the web by getting people to tag things competitively. reCaptcha is going to check lots of optical character recognition software out, while reducing the amount of spam I get on my blog.

Try it now: put a comment on the blog and see what happens.

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Trafalgar square today,
originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

Trafalgar Square has been turfed to promote greenery in London. Here are a couple of shots from my phone.

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Trafalgar square today,
originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

Trafalgar Square has been turfed to promote greenery in London. Here are a couple of shots from my phone.

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Some recent user generated content projects have been pretty disappointing in their responses, but that really isn’t the case with some of the entries for Pringles’ Spiderman 3 contest. Contestants are invited to submit videos on the theme of Pringles as a Hero, and some of them are incredible. People are spending serious amounts of time on quality entries.

Take a look at this one, and visit http://spiderman3.pringles.com for more.

And don’t forget to vote for the nutter that created this one

The last dalek

Vote for this video at the Pringles Spiderman 3 site!

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Thanks to Iain at http://www.crackunit.com/2007/05/22/spot-the-bull/ for reminding me of this. Poke have GPS-enabled a Bull for Orange (at http://spotthebull.orange.co.uk/ and competitors have to guess where it is exactly on a map, to win tickets to Glastonbury.

I really like the combination of web, GPS and a fabulous sense of humour that came up with all of this. Even the Captcha device to beat robot entries is well done. Nice one!

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With Google making so much of their data collection and targeting potential, I made the observation the other day that more people trust Google than trust the Government, and some people had the temerity to disagree with me, so I’m keen to find out what the real answer is.

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This is the presentation I used at today’s Brown Bag Lunch on blogging at Agency.com.

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Attendees at the blog presentation,
originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

What do you think of them then? A good crowd?

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