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Is Your Blog A Force for Good or Awesome?

By crooky | August 15, 2008

I always encourage people who own their own businesses to blog. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your site and at some level, fulfills that narcissistic drive we have to see our own words in print. There are a few things you can do with your blog to give back. This post talks about them.

1. reCAPTCHA

If you’re an Internet regular, you’ll have seen a CAPTCHA form at some point (see example below). What CAPTCHA does is combat spammers who would use your comments section to try to sell your readers Viagra or anime porn. It forces them to input a highly distorted text to verify that they are a human and not a computer program.

Computer software is not very good at pattern recognition which is why there are programs like Galaxy Zoo that rely on human’s innate ability to recognize patterns. the reCAPTCHA project uses unreadable optical character recognition (OCR) output from archival scanners as CAPTCHA text instead of creating new distorted text.

That way, everyone who has to use a CAPTCHA entry form to post a comment on your blog is actually helping Carnegie Mellon University researchers digitize old books for future generations to enjoy. I’ve recently added this feature to my own blog thanks to a tip from my wonderful Webmaster - Marta Ekert.

If you have CAPTCHA on your site, you should consider using reCAPTCHA.


2. Blog Action Day

My good friends at Envato (formerly Eden.cc) started Blog Action Day last year - a mass blogging event that saw more than 20,000 bloggers post on the same day to raise awareness of evironmental issues.

This years’ project is calling on everyone to post on October 15, 2008 on the topic of “poverty”. I encourage you to join me in discussing poverty on your own blogs this year. Just click the banner above to register your blog for this worthwhile project.

Ps. Cyan and Collis from Envato are going to be in Vancouver on vacation sometime soon. If you’d like to join us for a drink, drop me a line.

3. Give Some Profile to Local NGOs

I do a lot of work with non-profit organizations like the Learning Disabilities Association of BC and the SFU Alumni Association. These worthy causes need all of the publicity that they can get and I recommend you spend some time on your blog talking about the great organizations you work with.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for over ten years.

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Topics: social issues |

One Response to “Is Your Blog A Force for Good or Awesome?”

  1. shanti Says:
    August 24th, 2008 at 7:27 pm

    Thanks for sharing the tools. I’ve just installed reCAPTCHA on my own blog.

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