PickensPlan.com Uses Social Media Activism

A few minutes ago, I saw something on TV I don’t think I’ve ever seen before - a nonpolitical commercial that advocates a plan to detoxify this country from its dependence on foreign oil.  Have a look-see for yourself.  Although, I instantly recognized the old fellow in the video as mega-billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens - this being the election season - I still expected to hear the phrase “Paid for by supporters of ____”.  Imagine my surprise when no such endorsement came (did you feel the same way?).  Curious to find out more information about the so called “PickensPlan”, I jumped over to PickensPlan.com and did some clicking around.

Now, regardless of what you may think about T. Boone Pickens as a human being, or his political beliefs, business practices or philanthropy, you have to admire the way he (or his online marketing agency) is putting the power of Internet social media to work.  It’s all there right down to the web 2.0 blue color scheme of the website.  With chicklets leading to every social media network that matters, a video blog, a forum, badges for webmasters to post to their site, he’s making savvier use of social media elements than a group of teenage girls the day after a high school prom.  And this is exactly how it’s supposed to be done.

I’m willing to bet Mr. Pickens’ social media blitz won’t play any small role in getting people to do verbs such as write, organize, and collaborate once they’ve viewed the print and television commercials.  Despite budgeting nearly $60 million to promote his plan, the site has all the look and feel of a true online grassroots movement. The main page is designed as a gateway to get people interested and educated about the PickensPlan, while offsite islands of social networking pages on Facebook and MySpace serve to help new evangelist spread the message to members of their personal network.  It’s hub marketing.  Pretty clever.  I urge folks not to be so quick to chalk this up as an act of charity from a kind old businessman who has had a good run and now wants to do something good for the rest of us.  Pickens’ company has a considerable amount to gain if the plan comes to fruition. However, I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say fossil fuel won’t last forever.

Here’s the PickensPlan in case you were wondering what all the hype is about:

CAPTCHA Goes Green with reCAPTCHA

Apparently, CAPTCHA, the series of nonsensical characters presented to users at the end of a website form to certify your humanity, is a renewable resource. Luis Von Ahn, one of the minds behind CAPTCHA technology, has teamed with Carnegie Mellon to launch the reCAPTCHA project. Quite often when a book is digitized even the best OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs will incorrectly interpret some characters, and as a result misspell words. When an error is detected, usually by failing to find the word in a dictionary file, reCAPTCHA kicks in by harvesting the human user’s ability to interpret squiggly letters. From the reCAPTCHA website:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

By some estimates, reCAPTCHA provides more than 3,000 man hours of free work per day. Ok… I’m down to fight spam and proofread books with just a few keystrokes.

Thanks For the Great Deal, AT&T

I love being an AT&T customer.  I really do.  But I just had to share this since ecommerce and mobile technology fall within the jurisdiction of the Digital Sapien Blog.  Have a great 4th of July.