Tom Says: Safe code is boring code!
bibfind is a web site created by my friend Mason to help marathon runners find photos of themselves on Flickr taken by other people. It's a public service at the moment; there aren't even ads. And besides his effort to seed the site with data, he doesn't plan to have to do much to keep it running. He makes visitors do all the work for him.
His idea is incredibly simple to execute, inspired by the Google TechTalk "Human Computation" given by Luis van Ahn. Before a visitor can find photos of themselves by the number on their marathon bib (name tag), they must help by labeling several other photos with their visible bib numbers. The site gets more useful the more people need it.
There are nuances of the implementation to keep it safe from careless and malicious users, make it likely as possible that users will find themselves even in photos where their bib is slightly obscured, and so on.
In fact, for a site with three pages, it's really useful. "Crowd sourcing," "human computation," or whatever you'd like to call it seems like an incredible transitional solution before computers have enough information to be able to gather useful information from the world on their own. Please watch the previously linked lecture if you don't believe me, or if you want to be inspired on how to make other people work for you.
Posted Sep 11, 2008, in the afternoon.