Fireball

If you had seen Anniyan movie, and you have heard the famous “5 per 5 dhadavai 5 paisa thirudina” dialogue, you needn’t much explanation about crowdsourcing.

Freerice is one of the places which aims to give free rice to hungry people by playing a word game. But thats not hidden crowd sourcing! One of the best examples of hidden crowd sourcing is reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a wonderful method to crowd source where both the parties get benefited.

As the site says,

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.

Such an awesome idea, is being used in this blog for commenting. There are two captcha - words displayed. One for which already the answer is known, and another new one which you will be digitizing for the Internet Archive Books. After reCAPTCHA has shown the new one and gets lot of input, it shows it to another user as a known word.

On similar lines of crowdsourcing, a whacky thought:

The amount of force required for a keystroke is quite negligible. Generally, Buckling-spring type keyboards are used in normal keyboards while laptops have scissor-switch models. Buckling Keyboards are require more effort to press. But, consider a software industry where in there are millions of keystrokes per hour. If this mechanical work were to be converted to high quality energy, you could get extra incentive for your keystroke-labour And yes,It is assumed your company doesn’t use Macbooks.