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Updated 75 Days ago
St. Louis's First Interactive Media and Music Festival This Weekend
St. Louis's online-media types (read: bloggers, twitter folks, online video types...) have been planning a festival that will feature two days of panels, tutorials, and discussions spotlighting the important issues, tools of the trade, and people behind St. Louis's evolving interactive media industry.
The interactive media portion of festival (Inter:PLAY) is the brainchild of the St. Louis Bloggers Guild and is being produced in conjunction with Playback Magazine's PLAY:stl music festival. The festival features 14 interactive media panels, 4 music industry panels, and more than 90 bands and it all takes place this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in The Delmar Loop neighborhood.
So you don't consider yourself part of the geek-chic crowd? Don't skip out on the fun - the interactive media panels aren't just for the hardcore bloggers and social media experts. There will be something for people who are just getting started in the online self publishing industry (blogging), panels that will address companies interested in learning how to use social media to develop their online marketing presence, musicians who would like to learn more about using the online media for promotion, and panels for those interested in honing their personal photography skills, just to name a few. A complete list of panels, the experts speaking on them, locations, and times for the interactive festival can be found on the Bloggers Guild site.
Wristbands can be purchased for only $15 either online, by visiting participating businesses in The Loop, or on the day of the festival you can purchase them on site. The wristband gains you admission to all of the panels as well as the indoor band performances the entire weekend.
You can keep up with the Inter:PLAY 2008 festival by checking out the photos, message, and video aggregation page here on ToastedRav.com!
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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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.