thoughtcrumbs

ESP game

Not only did I spent last week perfecting my unflappable European subway stare, I also developed ESP. You can, too, with this ridiculously engaging game that seeks to label all of the images on the Web in thirty days. (As of right now, they've collected three million labels.) You and an anonymous partner online attempt to use the same terms to describe a picture, and like Taboo, certain obvious keywords aren't allowed. The most popular words win, and no single entity (like Google Images) has to do all the work. Yay for distributed metadata generation!

Doesn't this sound somewhat like the porn site owners' scheme to make their customers decrypt "captchas" (images with skewed non-computer-readable words) from Yahoo and Hotmail so that the porn sites could continue to get free email accounts for spam?