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Updated 205 Days ago
Kids these days....
I spent my morning doing a series of thirty minute "career day" presentations to 7th and 8th graders at Ridgewood Middle School in Arnold. Since I was there to talk about what I do, I spent a lot of time asking what they do...on the web, that is.
I can't say I was surprised to find out that MySpace.com is far and away the most popular website at Ridgewood. A very close second was another popular one, YouTube. 
In a very informal survey, about seventy percent of the kids picked one of those two sites as the one they enjoy the most.
One thing that was clear about the interests of these pre-teens and teenagers is the fact that an interactive internet is no longer a preference. It's an expectation. The groups I spoke with were almost exclusively fired up by social networking and gaming sites.
Beyond MySpace, I got several votes for MyYearbook.com. I'd be surprised if MySpace's lawyers haven't already filed a suit, because the similarities between the two are astonishing. MyYearbook is essentially MySpace for kids.
Gaming, you won't be surprised to hear, is huge. Gamesolo.com is a big hit amongst this group. 
The UK based site claims to have the hottest new flash games, with more stuff being added every week.
Then there's bored.com, who claims to be the link to the most fun and interesting sites on the web. There's plenty of gaming and music downloads here, along with my favorite title for a section: "How to annoy people."
Essentially what I learned today, is 7th and 8th graders want to play games and meet other 7th and 8th graders.
In other words, nothing has changed in twenty-five years other than the way they go about it. Web 2.0 meets Atari and puppy love!
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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.