Luis von Ahn
Massive Scale Online Collaboration. What is it? To put it broadly, it is the use of many people who contribute pieces to a greater project. It is a way of turning time and energy into a product instead of money. It is a way of making your mindless web activities into something productive.
Luis von Ahn has found two amazing ways to yield this potential, which he talks about in his TED talk.
reCAPTCHA
You know how some websites make you read disconfigured text in order to detect whether you are a human or computer? That is something known as CAPTCHA, and it was invented by Luis von Ahn. This precaution has brought much safety to the internet.
But what is reCAPTCHA? After von Ahn realized the amount of time people wasted by filling out these forms, he developed the second edition so that each time you type in a phrase, you're actually helping to digitize books.
The computer projects one word that it knows, and one word it does not. If you correctly identify the word it knows, it assumes the other one is correct. If ten people give the same word, that word has been confirmed transcribed.
And thus, reCAPTCHA not only keeps the internet safe, but also digitizes the wealth of human knowledge simultaneously.
Duolingo
Well I'd be darned. Duolingo, the site that taught me Spanish, the site which I wholly admire, was created by this very same person. Duolingo is able to operate for free because language learners practice their skills by translating internet articles.
So while people learn languages for free, the internet is becoming translated into a multitude of languages simultaneously.
What other ways can the internet be used?
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