ZURICH, Switzerland--Chances are that if you've solved one of those distorted-word tests to secure an account with Facebook, Craigslist, or Ticketmaster, you've helped The New York Times inch a little closer to digitizing its entire print newspaper archive from 1851 to 1980.
How have you unwittingly helped the Gray Lady by wasting 10 seconds on a computer-generated word challenge? It's thanks to a year-old initiative called ReCaptcha, a play on the antispam tests known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), a test that people can pass, but machines cannot.
People typically fill out Captchas so Web sites can verify that a human, rather than a spam bot, is behind the request for a new e-mail address, log-in, or membership. But with ReCaptchas, which are double-word tests, humans are also helping machines better recognize faded-ink or blurry words that have been digitally scanned from old newspapers or books--text that's difficult for a computer to recognize optically. That way, people will eventually be able to sift through print archives with a more intelligent search engine.
Luis von Ahn, assistant professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, created ReCaptcha.
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)In the last year, as many as 600 million people have completed at least one ReCaptcha on sites such as Twitter, LastFM, and Ticketmaster, which use the technology for free, according to ReCaptcha creator and Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor Luis von Ahn.
With all those helping hands, von Ahn expects that The New York Times digitization project will be finished by the end of 2009, at the latest. (About five months ago, The New York Times paid an undisclosed sum to von Ahn's CMU team to complete its project.)
"We're reusing wasted human cycles," von Ahn, 28, said while speaking at a robotics conference here recently.
The venture involves putting millions of eyes on words printed in roughly 47,000 newspapers, with various counts of pages. For example, before the turn of the century, The New York Times was about one-fourth the breadth it is today. It's doubled in size about every 50 years or so since its beginning in the 1850s, when it was published every day except Sunday. (The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Von Ahn's team is also helping the Internet Archive with the digitization of books through ReCaptcha, but it's doing that project gratis.
In fact, von Ahn, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (or "genius award") in 2006 for his work as a computer scientist, only wants to aid projects that work for the good of humanity. His main work-related guilt, it seems, is that he helped invent Captchas in the first place (in 2000, so that Yahoo could fend off spammers). And that's only because he's factored how much time people have wasted on the four- to six-character tests. He's estimated that people type 200 million Captchas every day around the world, or a collective estimate of 500,000 man hours (at 10 seconds per puzzle).
But that lost time is nothing compared with the amount spent on games--another key focus for von Ahn. By the time the average American has turned 21, researchers estimate that he or she has spent about 10,000 hours playing video games--that's the equivalent of holding down a full-time job for five years. In 2003, players collectively spent 9 billion human hours on the game Solitaire. In contrast, building the Empire State Building took only 7 million human hours, or the equivalent of a collective 6.8 Solitaire hours.
A slide from von Ahn compares the time people spend on games vs. the time spent constructing major physical structures.
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)Such thoughts spurred von Ahn to create Games with a Purpose, or Gwap.com, a project designed to harness people's time having fun to solve bigger computational problems. (The field is known as human computation.) He developed the first of those games, the ESP Game, several years ago to tackle image labeling to improve Web search. The game asks two randomly paired people (on different computers) to describe the same image without any way to communicate. Within a time limit, the players must predict the same word for an image before moving onto another image.
It's infectious. As many as 200,000 players have provided 50 million labels for images since the game was created, according to von Ahn. Some people play as much as 20 hours a week.
Normally, companies like Google or Yahoo would need to hire people to label the millions of images in their archives. But with only 5,000 people playing the ESP Game simultaneously, they could label all of Google's image archive within two months, he said. That must be why Google licensed the ESP Game from von Ahn and Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 to label its images.
Even though it would seem Google has completed its image labeling, it's really a never-ending project because of a constant influx of photos and people's changing perceptions.
For example, people's perceptions of celebrities like Britney Spears or political figures like George Bush morph over time. Just two years ago, labels for Britney Spears were as simple as "Britney" and "hot." But recently, they turned into "crazy," "shaved head," and "rehab." President Bush's tags have gone from "George" and "President," to "dumb" and "yuck."
Thanks in part to the success of the ESP Game, von Ahn and a team of 10 computer scientists at CMU have launched four new games to solve different artificial-intelligence problems. Gwap.com, introduced in May, is the umbrella site for all five games, which include the new Verbosity, Tag a Tune, Squigl, and Matchin. Since May, the site has attracted about 85,000 registered users.
Tag a Tune, for example, is much like the ESP Game, but for audio recordings. A player must figure out if he or she is listening to the same song as an opposing player by watching their descriptive guesses and making guesses of their own.
There's a 50 percent chance players are listening to the same song. That game would help describe the contents of audio recordings in a way that someone could eventually ask a search engine for a "happy song about rainy days," rather than using the exact song title. Squigl asks players to outline an object they see in a photo--a task meant to eventually further the field of computer vision.
Next up: von Ahn plans within the next three months to introduce a game that deals with labeling video clips. That way, the system would improve search over video archives. It currently doesn't have any other licensors for its games, although it's easy to see a host of interested parties for audio, music, and video labels.
In a bit of procrastination of his own, von Ahn had been thinking about how not to waste time with games, and then Captchas, at least two years before he acted on a project to recoup energy spent on word tests. He's certainly seen some weird things since he helped get them started on Yahoo in 2000.
A slide from von Ahn illustrates the estimated time an average person spends on various activities. If you calculate the time an average American has spent solving Captchas, it might work out to be 1.9 seconds per day, according to von Ahn.
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)HotorNot.com, for example, has shown prospective account holders images of nine women and they must pick from the selection which three are "hot." Von Ahn said that through this exercise, a man met his wife on the site.
Spammers have also created so-called Captcha sweatshops to get around the tests. He said that they will hire people for an hourly wage of $2.50 and the average worker will solve about six word puzzles per minute. Even though Captcha sweatshops generate new jobs, von Ahn said he would rather put people's time to better use.
"I started thinking about how you could direct people's efforts in a way that's good for humanity," he said.
Last year, von Ahn introduced the ReCaptcha free antispam system with a double-word test (six to eight characters each), which, it turns out, doesn't take people any longer than solving many single-word tests that mix characters, he said. With two words, the system can develop a confidence rating for the human by serving up one word the computer doesn't know, with another it does know.
Digitizing books or old newsprint is a worthy chore for von Ahn. Typically, if you print something, then scan it, the computer's optical character recognition would be able to "see" the text with 100 percent accuracy. But for older works, with faded ink or warped letters, OCR will not detect the words with accuracy. Recaptcha, which literally shows words scanned from old New York Times newsprint or books in the queue for the Internet Archive, uses people's intelligence in this process.
From blogs like Wordpress and sites like Craigslist, Recaptcha is digitizing between 15 million and 16 million words a day. Sometimes, however, the automated system generates offbeat combinations of words, such as "bad" and "Christians," or "damn" and "liberal."
As for clients other than The New York Times? Von Ahn said he's been approached by at least one bank that wanted to digitize checks, but he turned that offer down.
"We want to do stuff with the preservation of important material," he said.
Backchannelmedia on Chronicle WCVB-TV 5 Boston, is bringing the click-through from the web to TV. So you can see something now and learn about it later.
Imitation:
Situation
The market pressure to create technology products that protect or at least damage their impact to the environment continues to grow. Sustainability and green-tech campaigns are coming from nearly every tech company –esp hardware manufactures. Dell is no exception and launches this Regeneration campaign.
Goals
I’ve not spoken with the Dell marketing team, but it’s pretty obvious this is a campaign helps to help improve Dell products to be more eco-friendly, and of course, spur affinity torwards the brand from green leaning consumers, the ReGeneration site has more details.
Strategy
Dell Computers, along with Federated Media (A social media marketing agency), and Graffiti Wall (A popular self-expression Facebook application), deployed an interactive marketing campaign that encouraged existing Graffiti artists to be involved in a contest that spurred a member created campaign resulting in affinity towards Dell. The artists were encouraged to ‘own’ the message, their creativity would spur a contest, and would continue to fuel the campaign.
Tactics
I was briefed by James Gross, who shares his thoughts mid-flight, a Director at Federated Media, as well as CEO John Battelle (interview), and they explained the contest to me.
1) Existing application with thriving community
Graffiti is a self-expression application in Facebook. It has popular (rated 4 out of 5 stars) Based on 242 reviews, and has 177,506 daily active users. Rather than creating a new application, this campaign took advantage of an application –and community–that already existed.
2) An art contest: What does Green mean to you?
Facebook members who used Graffiti were encouraged to join in a contest to win a 22″ environmentally friendly Dell monitor (appropriate for artists) to create art around the theme of “What does Green mean to you?” The contest lasted for one week
3) Engaged contributors spur theme
Over 7000 pieces of artwork were created and submitted to the contest. If you watch the replay of the art being created, you’ll see hidden messages (like easter eggs) from the artists as they discuss what green means to them. Many of the drawings had the Dell logo or the regeneration logo embedded in it. The Regeneration microsite promotes a few contributors.
4) Self Regulation
There were few negative pics that would detract from the campaign, as the community of existing artists will self-regulate and vote off pics that were not appropriate.5) Community Voting and Winners Announced
Voting began on the second week by the members and over one million votes were cast. The winners were from United States, Canada, Sweden and Maldives. You can see the actual winners here, or click image.
Results
The campaign was a success, thousands of engaged members participated, created the campaign on behalf of Dell (similar to the Chevy Tahoe campaign a few years ago), and the community was rewarded. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll guess the majority of the campaign dollars were spent creating the microsite, then hiring FM, and working with Graffiti. The monitors, were likely less than a $1000 each.
Over 7300 Graffitis created from Jan. 16th-Jan 23rd around the theme of “What Does Green Mean to You”
Over 1150 fans of the contestOver 1,000,000 votes were logged from Jan. 26th-Jan.31st for the artwork. (Here are the Top 150 based on votes) Over 1,000 ideas have now been submitted over at ReGeneration.org 209 comments to the post at ReGeneration.org Over 197 blog mentions in Technorati
What could have been better
When it comes to social media, the mentality of short lived campaigns should go away. Communities existed before a brand reaches to them and after the campaign stops. Marketers should plan for long term engagements with these people, rather than short two week spurts. There was clearly traction here and now’s the time to step on the gas and continue forward.
Secondly, the artwork created by the winners (and runner ups) should be included in future products, such as digital wallpapers, in the primary branding for Dell, and even the artists should be given an option to continue as sponsored artists. With the relationship forming, take it to the next level. Encourage artwork to be part of next generation green computers, with proceeds going to non-profits or back to the artists to continue forth.
Thirdly, the campaign was limited to Facebook, which isn’t the extent of artists on the web, as well as limited to other social networks such as Bebo or MySpace where similar communities can be found. The contest should have been created not just within the walls of a closed gardens, but also spread to the open web.
Summary
Unlike most marketing campaigns that deploy heavy ads, fake viral videos, or message bombardment, this campaign let go to gain more. Overall, this is a successful campaign as they turned the action over to the community, let them take charge, decide on the winners, all under the context of the regeneration campaign. The campaign moved the active community from Facebook closer to the branded Microsite, closer to the corporate website, migrating users in an opt-in manner that lead to hundreds of comments was clever. Well done.
Articles and Related Case Studies
Article: Virtual art for the natural world MediaPost Social Media Insider: Maybe Advertising In Social Media Should Be An Oxymoron LA Times: Web Scout: Spinning through online entertainment and connected culture Case Study: How Sony connected with the Vampires Application Case Study: Facebook Sponsored Group Analysis: Target vs Wal-Mart
The research provides the data behind a trend that we’ve been observing for some time. Around 50% of the tech-savy population in the UK will be online whilst they’re wathcing TV (this kind of multi-tasking is why some people claim we now have 38 hours in our day!). People are truly cross-platform and so brand building needs to operate cross-platform too.
The other headline statistic from this research is that combining TV and online leads to a 47% increase in positive brand perceptions compared to using either in isolation. A consumer is more likely to purchase when the two are used together, and so it’s great for conversion too.
Digging beneath these headlines, it’s interesting to look at how best to combine these media:
Looking at this split, it is clear that TV and online both play different roles in the minds of consumers. TV is about the new and the now, it is good as an interventionist medium to tell people about new things they might not have considered. Online is about reflection and information. It’s less interventionist and more about the consumer using it to find the information they need and to inform themselves.
This seems to fit with the pattern of consumer behaviour online that we witness. More consumers are using online to find information about and even discuss a brand. We also see a high success rate of TV advertising causing people to go and visit websites in their own time to get more information about the brand or product.
It’s clear that the two media work well together and that to build a brand successfully a strategy is needed both for television brand building but also online. Brands need to own their online space and create successful and effective campaigns that are about building the brand online, and not just transactional.
Original post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/07/combining-online-and-tv-to-boost-brand/
One of the ways I have "monetized" this blog and other efforts in the social space has been the privilege of getting out and speaking to folks in the marketing field from a variety of perspectives. The refreshing part for me is that many marketers who I talk to are expressing the desire to move away from gimmicks, and traditional campaign thinking to solutions that offer more long term value and builds relationships.
BUT
There are a great deal of hurdles that marketers who want to do less subservient chickens and more Nike+'s will face. This post isn't meant to be negative—it's a reality check. If marketers on both the client and agency side really want to extend their influence, we'll need to ween ourselves from the impulse to spin the "Wheel of Marketing Misfortune". It won't be as easy as it sounds. So here's where we need to get to work:
Microsite Madness
The Microsite is actually a great thing. It allows us to quickly launch an initiative that can link out to and be linked to from other sources and allows marketers to bypass slower moving large scale site efforts. But increasingly, microsites are being cranked out by the thousands. Many of them are sold as "high-engagement" vehicles when in reality they become souless, glossy artifacts that come off as traditional promotions in a digital shell. Microsites as a format are not inherently bad, but we really need to think about why users will want to spend some time there, and even more importantly, why they would come back.
Viral Addiction
Let's be honest with ourselves. Marketers are severely addicted to the idea of "viral", and will do whatever it takes to make something reach this level of marketing nirvana. The problem with viral is that it's a crap shoot and all of the time spent chasing the "viral dragon" could be invested in improving the customer experience, which ironically is what creates authentic word of mouth in the first place. Again, viral is not a bad thing—but it's tricky business and marketers need to clearly identify the need for buzz before pursuing it at all costs
Flashturbation
We need to think of Flash the same we think about incredibly powerful mediums such as television and radio. When done well, television can inspire and motivate us—when done awfully it comes off as annoying and makes us want to flip channels. I think Flash is a wonderful technology and tool, but like any powerful tool it gets abused way too much, often times at the expense of the end user. I've written about Flashturbation before and urge designers and marketers to use the technology responsibly. Think about what happened to airbrush artists who spent all of their time pushing that technology to it's limit. Where are they now?
Death By Big Idea
"The Big Idea" is still very much alive and well—but it's less relevant than it's ever been. Especially big ideas that start with a top down broadcast messages first. This is campaign thinking in it's finest and does not translate directly in a fragmented 2.0 world. Bud.TV for example was a "big idea" fueled by traditional thinking—what followed was a "big bang" launch, but not the engagement. Marketers are going to need to diversify how we think, which means supporting both big ideas and lots of "big-little ideas" that can thrive in the niches. That's one of the biggest challenges marketers now face. Thinking in niche—the internet thrives on it.
Award Infatuation
Let's get this straight. Peer recognition is important and we should celebrate when one of our own does something remarkable. But the awards industry is here to make money too—and many of us are all too happy to forget about putting customers first in the pursuit of praise. Agencies especially have to come to terms with this and should all talke a cue from what's arguably the #1 brand in existence right now. Google. We really need to think hard about how compatible awards are with being "Googly". Actually, they are—but one needs to come before the other.
Social Media Goldrush
The "social revolution" is real, transformational and not going away. However, we need to proceed with a little caution. Not every tactic requires "conversation". Marketers need an intimate understanding of how social networks actually function and what is has to do with their business and brands. Then, we need to try a few things and learn by doing. But there's gold in them thar hills—which means that everyone right now who is claiming to be an expert in this area could potentially steer you wrong. I am way more active than most when it comes to the social space and I would NOT consider myself an expert. Let's be smart about how we can take advantage of the behavioral shift in this area. We'll need to be better at establishing credibility before we can guide, and the last thing we need is snake oil salesman.
Churn-n-Burn
Because much of marketing is deeply rooted in quick hits that demonstrate short term spikes, we've gotten used to an intense industry to work in that risks burning many of us out. The industry is fast paced and more than happy to put fresh meat to work. This is something that is not sustainable, especially in the digital space where there is a shortage of talent who truly knows what they are doing. We'll need to overcome this somehow and it will take some time.
Shiny Object Syndrome
I've talked about BSOS (Bright and Shiney Object Syndrome), and most marketers are guilty of it. It stems from the addiction to always looking for the "next big thing" without gaining a deep understanding of what's on our plate at the moment. The result is a loss of credibility both in and outside of the industry. We'll need to do a better job balancing what's next with what's already here. The real risk here is creating initiatives that bomb because we missed the mark on where the customer's head was actually at in order to satisfy where our heads may be at.
Banner-Palooza
We're turning the internet into Times Square. While we digital marketers claim to be cutting edge, we're not willing to turn down the lucrative ad banner business. Again, there's nothing wrong with it—but for aspiring designers who work in marketing and someday want to design the next You Tube, banner ads will most likely not help you get there.
Campaign-Itis
If we're truly living in an "application economy", then marketing/ad campaigns are not the end all be all though they are still important. But the biggest shift powered by digital is that the average Joe/Jane has become the new storyteller and digital experiences are becoming more important to an empowered consumer who frankly has more options than ever before. Point in case, I recently ordered a replacement keyboard for my family's HP computer and was severely disappointed to see that HP had downgraded their industrial design. The original keyboard was stylish, finished with metalic silver and felt right to the touch. The new keyboard only comes in back and feels like plastic. HP's campaign "The Computer is personal again" now feels like a lie to me. If we get another PC, it will probably not be an HP—and no campaign can influence that. It's time for marketers to bring the product, the experience and the marketing together because the average consumer is no longer making distinctions between them. The future of marketing will take both storytellers + experience people to pull it off.
So that's the "Wheel of Marketing Misfortune" in a nutshell. There's no reason to sugercoat it. We're all smart people who want to make what we do better. Whether you're on the client or agency side—it's time to get to work.
In what is typically a sign of growing broadband usage, the number of dial-up subscribers in Australia showed a notable decline last year, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Meanwhile, the number of high-speed subscribers climbed markedly.
Indeed, broadband penetration in Australia has been rising dramatically over the past several years. A clear majority of households had a broadband connection in 2007, and in 2008 more than 63% of homes, numbering just over 5 million, are expected to be high-speed Internet subscribers. ADSL is by far the most popular broadband technology, projected this year to be installed in almost 4 million households. The use of cable technology for broadband access is a distant second, with 785,000 users projected for 2008.
Across the board, whether via ADSL, cable or other technologies, broadband penetration is expected to continue to climb through 2012, when more than three-quarters of households in Australia are projected to have broadband access of some type. It is safe to say that Australia, despite its small population, is poised to take a top spot among the giants of the industrialized world with regard to broadband penetration.
Although the majority of Internet users in Australia have broadband, their preferred online activities are not bandwidth-intensive, according to Nielsen Online data released in March 2008. Some 98% of those surveyed said they used e-mail while online last year, making it by far the most popular Internet activity in the country. Financial activities were also favorites, including banking (72%) and bill payment (66%).
A minority of respondents said they used the Internet for various e-commerce activities, including purchasing airline tickets (44%), booking hotel and travel arrangements (37%) and auctions (37%). Activities related to research and information are especially popular in Australia, with 62% of respondents reporting they used the Internet for maps and directions and 59% for directories (yellow and white pages).
Design Your Own Volvo C30
Check out their video at this link http://improveverywhere.com/2008/07/06/human-mirror/ 
