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Updated 254 Days ago
ToastedRav.com Launches Voting on Blog Posts!
by Mike Flynn
Starting, well...last Friday, you can now tell us and the world what your favorite posts are, or who your favorite authors are or even what your favorite topics on ToastedRav.com.See that voting box near the headline of this story? Well you can just click on it if you like this story. Ta da! Yeah, I know it doesn't exactly set off fireworks in your pants or anything, but trust me, you voting on posts is huge! Why? Well very soon these votes are going to start to help us gear the content on the site to just want you want, and you will be able to see at a glance what the post popular stories on the site are at any given time. Now do you feel the fireworks? If not, just trust me. This can be really cool, but only if you vote for all the posts you like!
That all being said, you do need to log in before you can vote, but we have setup an easy way for you to login and not leave the page of the post you want to vote on, so this shouldn't be a problem for anyone. We need you to login just so we can keep track of what you like and so you can only vote once on a post (I know you might really like a post a lot, but one vote tells us you like it and thats all we need.)
Thats all for now!
Oh and I would make sure to vote, because it looks like Puffy means business.
About The Author:
Mike is the sole developer and associate editor for ToastedRav.com.He has been a blogger for over 5 years both on personal and professional websites and has a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Truman State University.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
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.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
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. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.