www.mynamesdave.com - shameless plug

This is just a bit of fun, but if your name is Dave you better join up and if it's not, then you better tell someone who is called Dave to sign up!

DMG - web design company in Guildford

We're a creative web design company which means, if you can think it, we can build it. And if you can't think it yet, we'll help you with that too.

Services include

- web design and build
- programming and development
- online promotions
- viral marketing
- social networking
- geomapping
- crm
- database integration
- virtual servers
- web hosting
- anti-virus
- virus scanning

oh yes and we're based in Guildford

Dial Media Group - a web design company in Guildford

We're a creative web design company which means, if you can think it, we can build it. And if you can't think it yet, we'll help you with that too.

Services include

- web design and build
- programming and development
- online promotions
- viral marketing
- social networking
- geomapping
- crm
- database integration
- virtual servers
- web hosting
- anti-virus
- virus scanning

oh yes and we're based in Guildford

Betcha didn't know that!

We've all seen Captchas right? Well you will almost certainly have used one before even if you didn't know what it was called. A Captcha is a 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart' and it's the box at the end of a sign up form or comment submission form (like you get when posting a link on Facebook) which makes you enter a word displayed on the screen as an image into a text box. The primary function of these boxes is to avoid spammers writing programs which make automatic submissions or signups to websites.

After a couple of years of successful use, someone had the big idea of using the time spent around the world filling these forms out to better effect.

So they added a second word. This seems a pain, but I'll explain why and you'll see the genius. Around 200 million of us spend around 10 seconds inputting Captcha words into forms every day which equates to 150,000 work hours. An ongoing challenge of the web is how to get the printed, pre-computer, pre-Internet word into a digital (and therefore searchable) format. Books are scanned and optical character recognition (OCR) software outputs what it sees as text. No OCR software is 100% accurate and therefore there are words it cannot digitise. Until now.

The images which cannot be deciphered by OCR are collected and sent via reCAPTCHA to the 100,000 or so forms around the web who use their freebie captcha widget. They also include an image of a word that the OCR program could decipher. If a user types in the word it knows to be correct, correctly, reCAPTCHA assumes the word it doesn't know will also now be correct. So, you can in fact type the correct word correctly and the unknown word incorrectly and still get through the sign up form (although an automated spammer couldn't). The unknown word is then sent onto a number of other reCAPTCHAS to see how other people see it until it reaches a point where reCAPTCHA is satisfied that the word OCR couldn't fathom has been, well, fathomed. It sends it back to HQ and puts it back in the original document filling in the blank.

We spend all day online and not much gets past us, however this one had me sat back in my chair for a while pondering just how some minds work. This might be the best use of crowd sourcing I've seen to date.

Learn more at http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

#moonfruit, MJ, Habitat and the iranelection

A busy week on Twitter. As brands start to realise they can no longer afford to ignore it, they are slowly starting to realise its potential.

Most of the big stuff relates to hashtags and the trending topics list. As the search is realtime, trending topics list what everyone is talking about NOW!

Obviously last week was Michael Jackson week with some reports claiming 85% of all tweets were about him. A staggering number but it gives a perfect insight into what we care about. Interestingly though, MJ's tweets dwindled fairly quickly. Sure he's still there today because of the funeral but just a couple of days after his death there were times when he wasn't on the list. What's interesting is that while the BBC and national newspapers the world over were continuing their blanket coverage, believing, as they do, that the story was enough to satiate our appetite for longer, we simply moved on. Decided we knew enough, paid our respects, heard some jokes and started talking about the next topic. It shows how traditional media is second guessing, incorrectly about what we want to consume. Before Twitter, blogs, facebook et al, we had to cope with this and just moan, or stop buying the paper and watching the tv but now we can do something else and be proactive. No longer are we forced to live in a world where media is scarce and spoonfed to us, now we live in the world of abundance and have infinite choice as to what we consume.

Anyway, newspapers won't be around for much longer so we'll have to find another industry to lament.

Back to Twitter then. Some bright spark at Habitat decided to have a go at using the trending topics in order to leverage Twitter's massive audience. But instead of coming up with something so great that it created a trending topic, it hijacked one instead. Simply adding #iranelection onto the end of their post, meant it would appear if someone searched for iranelection, or clicked on the trending topic. They immediately apologised and claimed they knew nothing about it and were investigating but I wonder if it was all a cynical, no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity effort? Where they went wrong was to pick a trending topic which was so fast moving. For example, if you wrote something about iran it would be gone in a flash as hundreds and even thousands of new tweets pushed it further and further down the river or feed or whatever they call it.

Much, much better is to be the trending topic yourself and if you can be the top of the list, even better. Moonfruit is a website creation tool and announced on its website for users to simply mention #moonfruit when they tweet and they'll give a random twitter user a Mac Book Pro every day for 10 days to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. Genius. They went to number one on the trending topics list and stayed there for 4 days, more than MJ. I clicked it and now own a moonfruit website for my photography hobby. They will have got millions of hits and it probably cost them $30,000 in Apple products. Think how much it would have cost in money and time to reach an audience of that size using any traditional method.

The Twitter revolution continues apace, what I like is that its owners never realised its potential until the audience got hold of it. A classic case of building something and admitting that the crowd will decide its best use far better than they ever could.