Seth Godin has a great idea that I have not heard or seen before. A captcha service you can implement in any web site for free and the only catch is the captchas have logos/advertising in them. I’m not sure if he’s just throwing the idea out there for anyone to jump on or if he has it in the works himself. I think the concept could fly.

Captchas are used to keep the bots and automated scripts from spamming web forms. It seems these things are getting tougher to read all the time and I’m finding myself needing to reenter my answer more often. But lately we are seeing the ones where you answer a simple math problem. I like the math problems better than a lot of the others until we start needing to use calculus to answer them.

Are there a lot of bots being used out there that use OCR and can read and answer non-distorted text captchas? I wonder if we really need to distort the text so much. If OCR capable bots are really prevalent the math problems are probably going to be hacked soon too. Maybe somebody can answer my question. Does anyone know the scoop on these things?

Many are opposed to commercializing things but I like this idea. Another cool idea from Seth. Seth’s blog is another one for our mimasm blogroll. His great marketing ideas and thoughts are worth the read and so are his books. Thanks Seth!