How do you get people off the Tube and onto London’s cycle lanes and pedestrian footpaths during the London 2012 Olympic Games?

According to TfL, it’s as simple as pointing people to the re:route iPhone app which rewards individuals every time they choose to walk or cycle around London. Whether your route is quicker, better for the environment or gets you burning more calories, you’ll earn points towards all sorts of treats – from haircuts and hotels, to shopping and spa days.

Recyclebank, the company behind the app is formed of a group of passionate people who’ve made it their mission to inspire others to take action – small to big – that will have a positive impact on our planet.

According to Recyclebank website:

We trade the actions you make that have a positive impact on your home by saving energy, community by recycling and the environment by conserving natural resources for points that you can use for rewards you choose. Those rewards come in a variety of flavours: Products, discounts and coupons from the world’s leading brands (think: Kashi, Footlocker, Dunkin Donuts), or you can pay the good deed forward by donating your points to support environmental education in schools.

TfL have already flirted with the idea of gamification with their Chromorama app which disappointingly has struggled to gain momentum with mainstream commuters. The game connects people’s Oyster cards with an online world where points are earned based on journey challenges that are completed. Chromorama adds a layer of adventure to the otherwise dull and often painful daily trudge faced by millions of Londoners.

Where Chromorama was let down was it didn’t allow players to convert points into tangible rewards – something that re:route obviously has as a key selling-point central to its proposition.

Will you be downloading the app? For us Androiders, we’ll have to wait a few more months, by which time the Olympic crowds may well be a distant memory…

Last year Google introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways.

As of today, Hangouts On Air is now available to all users across 40 countries (including the UK) who are 18+ and who have a YouTube account in good standing without any strikes (you will only have a strike on your YouTube account if you have previously posted content to YouTube which violates the YouTube policies).

So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:

• Broadcast publicly. By checking “Enable Hangouts On Air,” you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
• See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
• Record and re-share. Once you’re off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it’s easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it’s over.

I see this as an incredibly smart move by Google to force the hand of millions of YouTube account holders to join Google+. Also, how long before brands begin to climb over each other to launch their own live channels (events, product launches, Q&As, crisis management, etc.)?

Cadbury UK is already planning an Olympics Hangout on Air this Friday live from the Royal Albert Hall.

Sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.

I’ve just been forwarded-on a PDF of the International Olympic Committee’s  Guidelines for Social Media which were posted on the British Columbia Athletes website by Canadian writer Kalie McCrystal.

Whilst the guidelines are published for Canadian readers of the BCA’s website, they were originally drawn up for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games by the IOC to control material that was posted on social media websites by accredited personnel.

The current Guidelines were published by the IOC in August 2011.  They establish the dos and don’ts of social media during the 2012 Olympic Games in London and apply to all accredited individuals, including athletes, coaches, sport medicine personnel, volunteers etc.  The Guidelines are valid for the duration of the London Games (July 16-August 15, 2012).

The raison d’être of the Guidelines are to stamp out any implied unauthorised association of a third party to the Olympics (primarily for commercial profit). In what is being dubbed as the most monetised event in the history of the Games, violations of the IOC’s strict sponsorship rules are likely to be enforced by the letter.

Anything to do with the Olympics, including the rings, mascots, the word ‘Olympic’ etc. are part of the Olympic brand, and are copyrighted and owned by the IOC.  Official sponsors of the Olympics essentially buy the exclusive right to link themselves with the Olympic brand for the duration of the Games.  Understandably, these companies pay a lot of money for this right but what are the specific boundaries of these sponsors’ privileges?

Kalie McCrystal writes on BCathletevoice.ca:

To ensure the value of these sponsorships, companies that are not official sponsors may not be linked in any way to the Olympic brand.  For example, a tweet reading: “thank you Company X for sponsoring me at the Olympics!” links Company X, who is not an official Olympic sponsor, with the Olympic brand.  This takes away from the exclusivity that official sponsors pay for, and the athlete that wrote it will be held accountable.

Similarly, companies that are not Olympic sponsors cannot link themselves with the Olympics.  For example, Company X cannot tweet: “Good luck to Jane and John at the Olympic Games!”, because it links their brand with the Olympics and Olympic athletes.

This is important for sponsors to be aware of, as they could face legal action and Take Down Notices for violations.

This is pretty clear but in reality what lengths will the IOC actually go to in enforcing these rules?

Let’s put this into some kind of context. This year’s Superbowl final in the US attracted a record number of tweets per second. Twitter reaction reached 12,233 tweets per second (TPS) at the end of the Giants vs. Patriots game and 10,245 TPS during Madonna’s halftime performance. To physically trawl through all of these tweets would a) be a mammoth task and b) would be impossible to sift out brand tweets from those of spectators.

Now let’s fast –forward to this Summer’s London 2012 Games – the largest sporting event ever hosted in the history of the world. If the Superbowl attracted over 10k TPS, imagine the buzz that is likely to accumulate on Twitter and Facebook surrounding this year’s men’s 100m sprint finals or the 4×4 relays…

For years we’ve been telling brands to use social media with a human-voice, and nothing could be more natural than a home-grown business wishing team GB good luck at the Games – whether or not they were an official sponsor. Is the IOC realistically saying that it will put its might behind taking these companies to court for its well-wishes?

The IOC needs to tread carefully when monitoring social media for mentions around the terms Olympics and Olympic Games. Social media audiences are fiercely protective over what they see as being their native stomping ground and any attempts to legislate against the content of social updates could be met with cries of censorship and foul play – certainly not terms that the IOC would knowingly want to be aligned with.

If one of my clients wishes to tweet “Good luck Rebecca Adlington – we’re 100% behind you!” – should I advise them against doing so? Probably. But if we want to tap into the rich stream of  conversations that will be dominating this Summer’s social media, how can we avoid referencing the Games altogether? Or should we even try?

Here are the official Guidelines from the IOC on written  social media posts (including blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc.)

• DO post your experiences! Posts written in first person (using “I”), diary format are encouraged.
• DO follow principles of Olympism.  Keep in mind the Olympic spirit and fundamental principle of Olympism in the
• Olympic Charter.
• DO use the word “Olympic” factually.  As an accredited individual, you are permitted to use words related to the Olympics as long as it is a factual reference (ex. “I am en route to the Olympics!”), and doesn’t associate any 3^rd party or service with the Games.
• DO link official sites to your posts.  You are free (and encouraged) to provide links to official Olympic sites in social media.  This includes official sites of the Olympics, Olympic Games, and National Olympic Committee.
• DON’T act like a journalist. Only accredited media personnel may report on the Olympics.  Unless you have media accreditation, reporting on competition/results or commenting on the activities of athletes or accredited personnel is not permitted.  Make it clear that what you are writing is a personal account of your experience, or is your personal opinion.
• DON’T badmouth your NSO.  If your Athlete Agreement says you cannot speak badly about your National Sport Organization, the same goes for what you post on social media.
• DON’T defame people.  Defamation is when you make false and offensive comments that negatively impact a person’s reputation.  For a comment to be defamatory, it has to be about a specific person.  For example, “those refs made us lose the game!”, is not defamation, but “Referee Joe Smith favoured the other team and made us lose the game” might be.  This is a legal issue for which you can be sued, and you should be careful to avoid any potentially defamatory comments.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you have non-Olympic affiliated clients who are wating to get into the spirit of the Games via social media?

What will you be advising them?

I was contacted by the good folk at Pilgrims Choice this week as they had heard that I have a worrying addiction to sandwiches (just ask my colleagues)!

If you don’t know about Pilgrims Choice, you should. The company produces some of the finest cheddar cheese I’ve ever tasted. Their Real West Country Farmhouse Cheddar is handmade and if you ever had time to do a blind taste test, I guarantee it would stand out about a mile from other brands.

Anyway, on Monday the Big Cheeses at Pilgrims are to launch a brand new, interactive smartphone app called the ‘Good Sandwich Pilgrim’ which offers users the inspiration to put the glam back into their sandwich.

The app has over 100 expertly selected recipes to suit your every mood, taste and sandwich occasion. To help narrow things down simply select a category, for example choose ‘Cheesy’ and a range of Pilgrims Choice cheese related sandwich recipes will appear to inspire your lunch choice. Other categories within the app include Glamwich, Speedy, Cheap Eats, Healthy, Vegetarian, Sweet Tooth and Kids Lunchbox.

I’ve seen a preview of the app and am delighted that it is not just available on iPhone but also on Android too. Finally, a brand recognises that we Android-ers actually outnumber our Apple counterparts!

The ‘Good Sandwich Pilgrim’ app is being launched in appreciation of the great British sandwich and every single recipe has been developed and tested by one of the Pilgrims Choice expert chefs. In fact, the whole team at Pilgrims Choice seem to be total cheese aficionados if you look at their website: http://www.pilgrimschoice.com/our-passion/meet-the-team#nick!

What I genuinely like about this app is that it allows you to make the most of the existing contents in your fridge by simply searching by your mood for the ideal recipe solution. When you find one that’s particularly tasty, you can easily add it to your favourites list for easy reference in the future or share with friends.

It’s not just cheese that’s on offer (although there is a good selection) the app has a range of ideas and tips using interesting breads, wraps and fillings that you probably haven’t even considered for a sandwich. You can even upload your own sandwiches to show off your own mighty bite.

The YouTube video below showcases how the new app will work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHAmD_IL3jk&feature=youtu.be

And if the sandwiches still leave you with room to spare in your belly, take a gander at some of the recipes on their website. This one for 5-a-day Chunky Vegetable soup which encourages a generous helping of Pilgrims Choice cheddar:  http://www.pilgrimschoice.com/recipes/recipe-selection/5-day-chunky-vegetable-and-pilgrims-choice-soup

To download the app, just search for Good Sandwich Pilgrim in your relevant app store or visit the dedicate website: http://www.goodsandwichpilgrim.com/

On a complete side-note, I’m a bit tickled that Pilgrims Choice Cheddar is in fact an anagram of coerced girls hid a chimp:

The folk at YouTube got into the spirit of April’s Fool this year with its YouTube Collection – the chance to get all of your favourite YouTube videos sent to you by post, on DVDs.

Check out the “official” video: http://www.youtube.com/theyoutubecollection

If you try and order…

and then….

But the BEST quote has to be this one from the video:

“If you live on a steep grade or in an are with low over-passes, your DVDs will be delivered by pack-mule!“

Happy April 1st, guys!

These are my links for March 8th through March 27th:

• Four Potential Crashers of the Social Media Party – People are building businesses around Facebook, Twitter and, most recently, Pinterest. Wall Street is getting ready to be on Facebook's initial public offering. Everyone is seemingly in love with the potential to profit from social media.
• Embracing Change: Why Timeline for Facebook Pages is good for your business! – By now you’ve seen the notifications on your page management, and you may have already started switching your Facebook Page over to the new Timeline format. However, have you looked into all of the benefits that the new format offers? If you haven’t, then take the time now to look at how Timeline can help your Facebook presence.
• Friends Reunited is relaunched with focus on nostalgia. Will it woo back users? – Social networking site Friends Reunited relaunched on Tuesday, focusing on the nostalgic moments of people's lives.
• BRILLIANT!!! Startup Takes on Craigslist – by Punking Sellers [VIDEOS] – Craigslist has been a fertile source of comic inspiration for some time, but few have mined it as compellingly as startup Replyboard.
  The Seattle-based company, which went live on Monday, launched with four videos that feature Replyboard‘s co-founder Steinar Skipsnes and friend Nick Ellis punking real Craigslist sellers.
• What Would You Say to a Million Twitter Users? Fame Hopes to Find Out – If you woke up tomorrow with a million new Twitter followers — and had them for one day only — what would you tell them?
• Joseph Kony 2012: a model of modern campaigning – Telegraph – The campaign to get Joseph Kony arrested is a case study in how the web has changed political campaigning, says Matt Warman.
• Coca-Cola Prints 2,000,000 Tweets On Confetti To Show Fan Love [Video] @PSFK – Coca-Cola and Ogilvy Argentina created a fun project seeded in local tradition for the international soccer competition Copa America, by combining the paper throwing that takes place at matches with fan messages posted on Twitter to boost encouragement for the Argentinean national team.
• Twitter Plots Big Changes to Brand Pages | Digital – Advertising Age – Big changes are coming to Twitter's "brand pages," the landing pages it offers to some marketers that also spend ad dollars on the network.
• How to Use Facebook Timeline for Better Engagement | Social Media Today – So it’s here. Timeline for Facebook pages has arrived, and it looks fantastic. It might not be for everyone, but for big businesses it is a huge branding opportunity that if taken could really propel a Facebook presence to the next level.
• Facebook Plucks At Twitter With Launch Of News Feed Interest Lists | TechCrunch – Appealing to power users and Twitter loyalists, Facebook today lets users start creating and subscribing to “Interest Lists”. You can view updates from these collections of Pages and public figures in a dedicated news feed. They’ll be discoverable through suggestions of popular list and those created by friends.
• How to Optimize Your Brand’s YouTube Channel | Social Media Today – YouTube has a new design for channels. Conversion is mandatory. According to the support documentation, the new look “makes it easier for viewers to find and watch content.” It does a lot more than provide a consistent design. It severely limits the ability to create a customized look for brands that are not partners.
• Pinterest Now Generates More Referral Traffic Than Twitter: Study | TechCrunch – A new study by online sharing tool Shareaholic has found that Pinterest now drives more referral traffic than Twitter. Again, when it comes to referral traffic, Pinterest > Twitter.
• Facebook loses friends in Germany over privacy breaches — Engadget – Before you've even sipped your morning brew, a regional German court has delivered yet another stern judgement affecting a multinational organization. This time it's Facebook back in the dock over the Friend Finder feature, which uploads a user's contact list to Zuckerberg's bunker without proper warning.
• Why Channel 4′s attempt to harness Twitter buzz is ambitious – Telegraph – Figuring out what the digital chattering classes actually want to watch on TV is no easy feat. This is why Channel 4's new station, 4seven, will have its work cut out, writes Emma Barnett.

These are my links for February 29th from 11:00 to 23:34:

• Web Ink Now: How to create and edit articles for Wikipedia – Sure, Wikipedia is an open platform and anybody can create or edit an article. But it's more complicated than that. A lot more complicated.
• Company Reactions to Facebook Timeline for Brands – This morning Facebook launched Timeline For Brands, which will give brand pages the same look, feel and functionality as the personal page Timelines the social network has been rolling out since September.
• Online clothes-shopping: is an avatar the answer? – Tesco now offers a 'virtual fitting-room' on Facebook that you can try clothes on. So what did our writer make of it?
• KLM: A Company That ‘Gets’ Social Media – KLM is leading and innovative on social media and is always looking for new innovations. M&S; fits to the KLM promise of ‘a journey of inspiration.’
• 20 Facebook Page Cover Photos to Inspire Your Brand – Many companies are filling out their Timelines on Facebook back to the founding days — some dating as far back as 1822. Others are providing fans with more interactive experiences, asking them to engage in the company’s history for a chance to win prizes.
• Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 16% Of Your Friends – You’re not unpopular, it’s just the nature of the news feed. Amongst all the business-related news at FMC, Facebook revealed that the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 16 percent of their friends. Your actively shared links, photos, and status updates probably reach much higher than 16 percent of your friends, while more inane auto-generated posts about new friendships, wall posts, and articles you read may only be seen by your closest buddies.
• Business Data Reporting In 5-10 Minutes, Not Days. Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Insights | TechCrunch – Facebook has just confirmed its business performance metrics tool Page Insights will start reporting data with a latency of 5-10 minutes, not two or more days. It will open new tactics for marketers such as amplifying a well-performing post’s reach with ads, or deleting one receiving negative feedback before it can trigger Unlikes or a PR crisis.
• Facebook Brand Timelines: 6 Big Changes Every Marketer Needs to Understand – Today Facebook announced to brand marketers the world over that, within the month, everything they knew about fan Pages on Facebook would be overturned. While you get your brand ready for the new Timeline format, here are six important changes to keep top-of-mind.
• foursquare is joining the OpenStreetMap movement! Say hi to pretty new maps… – Foursquare just made what it called "a little announcement", but it's really not little at all. It's switching away from the Google Maps API to OpenStreetMap. For the map images, it hired MapBox, a start-up that makes pretty maps out of OpenStreetMap data. Starting with foursquare.com, foursquare's maps now use MapBox Streets.
• How Videos Go Viral [Video] – From the “trend manager” at YouTube – a guy who watches YouTube for a living. He gives us four very deep insights onto why we seem to love the most silly videos in the world. What a job that would be…
• Guardian open journalism: Three Little Pigs advert – video – This advert for the Guardian's open journalism, screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, imagines how we might cover the story of the three little pigs in print and online. Follow the story from the paper's front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion
• The Visual Cliff: What a 1960 Perception Experiment Reveals About Emotional Decision-Making | Brain Pickings – Why we’re all just babies on Plexiglas when it comes to interpreting and acting on emotional ambiguity.
• Facebook Timeline Brand Pages Are Here [PICS] – With Facebook Timeline‘s takeover of personal profiles complete, the social networking giant is unleashing its latest greatest invention upon brand Pages, too.
• Mugging victim given phone back as it ‘was not a Blackberry’ – Telegraph – A schoolboy mugger who snatched a mobile phone from his victim handed it back – because he wanted a BlackBerry.

These are my links for February 26th through February 29th:

• We Watch Our Phones More Than We Watch TV, But The PC Wins The Day | TechCrunch – Earlier today we saw a significant move from MTV to launch a social mobile TV service and some research out from InMobi today underscores just why these kinds of moves are so important right now for TV companies:
• Need More YouTube Views? Try Pinterest – Independent film and entertainment studio Lionsgate holds the majority (30%) of the market share of fitness DVDs. Naturally, the company decided to create a YouTube channel comprised of athletic content. What it didn’t anticipate is how effectively Pinterest could promote its YouTube presence.
• Isle of Man social media push to engage youth – The Isle of Man government is pushing plans to use social media to engage more young people in Manx politics.
• Angelina Jolie’ing – if you need *more* leg… – That's right, she's a verb now. Strut it like Angelina, show off your right leg to the world.
• Twitter sells tweet archive to marketers – Telegraph – Twitter has partnered with Datasift, a UK company, to allow businesses access to every single tweet posted by a user going back two years.
• Does a cameraphone really need 41 megapixels? – The launch of a new cameraphone boasting 41 megapixels has caused a stir on its launch. But how many megapixels do people need?
• Man dangles from building in O2 #workanywhere PR stunt – A stunt today for O2 will see a man dangle from a wall while working at a desk in Great Eastern Street, London, to prove the phone company’s ‘work anywhere’ message.
• Planet Content » How not to engage on Facebook – This is a story of bad Facebookship and also bad blogger relations.
• The Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest – Pinterest, the darling digital pin board that’s turned the social media world upside down, is now a top traffic driver for brands. That’s a good sign marketers should get their butts up to speed on the latest pinning tips and tricks.
• The LinkedIn Follow Button: Companies, Look Who’s Following You Now – Starting today, companies will be adding this button to their websites, making it easier for any consumer on the web to begin following companies of interest, on LinkedIn.
• 26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business – Pinterest’s ease of use for visually bookmarking, organizing and sharing things you love has made it a hit among individuals and businesses alike.
• Almost Three: A Brief History Of Foursquare Time (And A Look At Its Future) | TechCrunch – Foursquare already lets you specify events when checking in at major venues. But to meet their vision of “making cities easier to use”, they could re-invent the very foundation of their platform: the check-in. If Foursquare allows people to broadcast their plans ahead of time, there’s no reason why they can’t be what Plancast tried to become, “Foursquare for the Future“.
• Pinterest Drives Traffic For Women’s Magazines – A lengthy report over at Mashable says that image-bookmarking site Pinterest has become a significant source of referral traffic for women’s lifestyle, home decor and cooking magazines – challenging the domination of Facebook and Yahoo. Mashable
• Brilliant Newsjacking alert – The Artistifier – The Artistifier allows you to turn any YouTube video into an "award-winning" silent movie in the style the Oscar-winning film The Artist. You can even add your own captions before sending your finished black and white masterpiece via Facebook and Twitter.
• A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers – Newsweek's Dan Lyons accuses bloggers of reinventing PR, dressing it up as journalism and playing at venture capitalism
• The State of the Twitterverse 2012 by @BrianSolis – Top Factoids You Didn’t Know About Twitter

These are my links for February 11th through February 26th:

• From Ryan Giggs to Ryanair… Censorship, bans and ‘money can’t buy’ publicity – The Media Blog – It seems it has always been the case that attempts to stop the public seeing something only ever increases the publicity generated. Just ask Ryan Giggs – named this week as the fooballer behind a high court injunction, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.
• Spotify launches gapless playback programme for budding DJs – So you fancy yourself as a superstar DJ – but can’t deal with those awkward silences between the tracks?
• Hashtag Marketing on the Rise | Social Media Today – Television networks have been quick to leverage the power of the hashtag by displaying it in the bottom corner of the screen during a broadcast. Usually it’s the name of the program or TV show such as #Revenge, #TopChef or #PanAm.
• Get Real-Time Search Results from Google with a URL Tweak – Google offers a few preset search filters for time—past hour, day, week, etc.—but if you want much fresher information, you can tweak the URL. This will limit results so see what's happening in more of a near real-time flow of information.
• [STUDY] Facebook Defriending is on the Rise – A new study out from Pew confirms what we already know: People don't want to collect as many Facebook friends as possible. Social networkers are becoming more selective, managing their accounts and "pruning" people from their lists. More users are untagging themselves from photos, deleting comments and unfriending others. Women and younger users tend to prune more than others: 67% of women with social network site profiles have deleted users compared with 58% of men.
• The Truth Will Out: Verifying the Authenticity of Online Reviews – There’s been much discussion lately about the truthfulness of posts on review websites and the potential impact fake reviews can have on an organisation’s reputation. We all know Google operates as a shop window for many businesses and the impact reviews and WOM can have on purchasing decisions, but how can you be sure the review, either good or bad (there is evidence to suggest bad reviews can lead to increased purchases) is genuine?
• Business Blogging: Essential for Business Reach – There is a wide misconception among SMBs that business blogging is a waste of time.  But realistically, blogs are, and have always been great marketing tools.  When used effectively, an active blog with useful, free content can attract a lot of potential customers.  And in today's web environment with discerning readers and strong filtering tools, a compelling blog article can reach audiences further than direct marketing and traditional advertising practices.
• The next generation of wearable tech according to (the wonderful) @LJRich – Imagine a future where you had a smart t-shirt or a pair of wireless socks. One day your clothes might not even need any pockets for the gadgets because you'll be wearing them. LJ Rich reports on the progress of wearable technology.
• QR Codes Connect Art on the Wall With Music on Your iPhone – Portuguese artist Nuno Serrão wants to make art viewing more stimulating by incorporating music through an iPhone app and QR codes.
• Video PR: How To from the excellent Speed Communications Blog –
• US father Tommy Jordan shoots daughter’s laptop after ‘disrespectful’ Facebook posts | Metro.co.uk – When a US teenager posted a rant about her family online she could be forgiven for not expecting her father to film himself putting nine bullets in her laptop in retaliation and post it on her Facebook wall.
• Why Time Is of the Essence When Responding to Facebook Fans – This was one of the questions asked during a conversocial survey, facilitated through the New York University and its Assistant Professor Liel Leibovitz, Assistant Professor of Communications.  The survey – sent out online – was returned by 513 respondents and covered 9 questions – all around customer satisfaction with corporate attitudes on social business sites. The results are somehow shocking considering a majority of businesses still don't know
• Turns Out Being Drunk and Sleepy Can Do Wonders for Your Creativity – Common sense (and your irrational compulsion to, you know, keep your job) says drinking at work—or working when you're groggy—are bad news. But as Wired's Jonah Lehrer points out, recent studies reveal that being sleeping and/or drunk is great for creativity.

Need an excuse to stand that little bit taller today? Here’s one: YOU are actively involved in helping digitise the world’s books (via Google Books) and the entire newspaper archive of the New York Times, making the printed word eventually accessible to billions of people online. I bet you weren’t even aware that you were involved in this noble pursuit of epic proportions?
If like me, you spend a lot of time online, you probably need no introduction to the item below.

reCAPTCHA

It’s a reCAPTCHA code. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart) is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colourful 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.

Sure, they can be incredibly annoying, but probably not as annoying as it would be for website-owners to be bombarded by automated bot spammers who could potentially bring about malicious denial of service attacks which could easily bring down entire online services within minutes.

It soon became apparent that the necessary chore of typing in random words to authenticate one’s membership to the Human Club could actually be used to solve wider problems that could, if solved, benefit the larger web community. Here’s the thinking:

200 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.

CAPTCHA’s co-inventor Luis von Ahn repurposed the program into what is today known as reCAPTCHA and the security system is now used to get people typing in scanned words from books two at a time, to help translate printed text into something that can be recognised by computers.
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 (optical Character Recognition software) 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.

The following video from Sciencentral shows how the reCAPTCHA system actually works:

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.

Now that’s pretty smart, right?
So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, add a friend on Facebook, sign-up to a new Twitter account or create a profile on 350,000 other sites on the internet, you’re also helping to digitise an actual book. The number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the amount of words that we’re collectively digitising per day is really, really large. It’s about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year.

And this is all being done one word at a time by just people like you and I typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet.

Whatever next?

Luis von Ahn’s next project is equally, if not even more ambitious in setting out goals for his crowdsourcing vision. He now wants to get the world to translate the web into other languages whilst learning a different language for themselves.

Duolingo is a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents. Currently, the site offers only Spanish and German courses for English speakers, though it has plans to expand to French, Italian and Chinese in the future.

Duolingo launched in private beta on November 30, 2011, and has accumulated a waiting list of more than 100,000 users. As of January 19, 2012, the service has translated over 45,000 sentences.

[Click here if you cannot view the Duolingo Intro video above]
Personally, I think that this kind of crowdsourcing micro-tasks for a common goal is a genius idea – particularly when the larger outcome is often a secondary by-product of what drives individuals to use services like reCAPTCHA or Duolingo.
However, there are some cynics out there who criticise the Duolingo model for being naively simplistic in its readiness to motivate people to take up a new language. Writing in the Guardian, Maurice Claypole – no stranger to people-powered translation services, claims:

“Translation can play an important part in language learning, but a methodology constructed specifically around the translation by learners of decontextualised text snippets reveals a view of language learning which is simplistic in the extreme.”

However, I doubt that the team behind Duolingo would commit time and resource to such a large project without factoring in the drivers required for individuals to actively benefit from the learning experience. I’m signed up for the site’s Spanish beta study programme and am currently awaiting the green light from the invite team. Or as they say in Spainsh… luz verde.
If you want to know more about Luis von Ahn’s journey from CAPTCHA to Duolingo, I urge you to check out his brilliant TED talk that he gave towards the end of 2011. Truly inspiring.

So next time you’re feeling undervalued, think about your role in bringing classic works of literature to the digital masses*.

*(Shakespeare would shake your hand in person if he could)