We've been big fans of reCAPTCHA since we first saw it in 2009. By the time Luis von Ahn had finished speaking about it at Thinking Digital in 2010 - receiving a standing ovation from some of the awestruck crowd - we'd vowed to one day feature it on one of our sites. So we're pretty excited to finally be able to feature reCAPTCHA on our blog.

For those who haven't seen it before, reCAPTCHA is a way to use captchas - those warped strings of letters and numbers that you have to enter on some online forms to defeat bots - to digitise books. The system scans books and documents and uses optical character recognition to try and make sense of them. If it has trouble identifying a word, it sends it out into the wide world as a reCAPTCHA, to be identified by real actual people with real actual eyes. So when you complete the reCAPTCHA below, to add a comment to this blog, you're not only proving you're a human and not a spambot, you're helping to preserve literature for posterity. OK, so it's a really teeny tiny bit of literature, but it still counts.

Anyway, we're an ethically motivated business, and having an ethically motivated captcha just struck us as the right thing to do. It's a very small step but we're proud to make it.