Ok, so I’ve added a “Captcha” style comment verification to my posts.

The good news? My hosting service has re-enabled comments.
The bad news? You have to guess what the smudgy text says and type it in.
The good news? When you retype the smudgy text you’re re-typing, and confirming, text that’s been scanned from old books using the reCaptcha collaborative web service.

Here’s how that works, according to their website:

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.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

eCAPTCHA 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 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 process is actually pretty cool. Get the whole non-technical rundown here.

At any rate, while I regret having to subject you to comment confirmation at least I was able to find something that actually does something besides strain your eyes.

Update: If you missed a chance to comment on one of my posts from earlier this week those should work now too. Even the egregious Lonesome Folksinger HNT post that, for poetic reasons if nothing else, I should have left closed. :-)

Update #2: Also, in the interest of getting more books scanned, I’ve added a “reply to this comment” feature so that you can reply directly to each other’s comments as well as to my posts. (Just be polite to each other — I’m way nicer to people who are mean to me than to my important guests… and I feel strongly that every one who visits, let alone comments, is a very important guest!)