The Idea Dude

CONNECTING THE DOTS ONE AT A TIME

Monday, January 22, 2007

Quite brilliant

I was over at Uninstalled (isn't that such a cool name for a blog? ok that was the geek within speaking) who commented on Seth Godin and Jean-Yves Stervinou's idea of making money out of "captchas". What are captchas? They are those images that contain fuzzy characters that you have to type in before submitting a form to deter bots from behaving like humans.

Their idea? replace the image of random characters with an image of a brand name like "Drink Coke". This is probably the first ad oriented idea I've seen that not only makes you look but reinforces the brand by making you type the byline or product name. Whether visitors are willing to do this or find this so offensive, the jury is still out. Nevertheless as a different idea in a mass of web conformity, it is simply quite brilliant.

2 Comments:

Blogger michaelo said...

Heh. Thanks so much, Dude. My blog's current title is kind of a long story. It was originally intended to be a temporary thing, but I guess I kind of liked it, so it stuck.

For the first three years, the blog was called "I Love Me, vol. I" - which was a half-arsed attempt at self-mocking humour wrapped up in clever, clever wordplay (it's a palindrome).

But no one ever seemed to get the joke (I was constantly explaining it, and pointing out that it only works if you remember it's the Roman numeral 'I', not the number '1"). Sigh.

Then something happened that prompted me to re-brand, and I've grown to really like it.

Glad you enjoyed the Captcha thing too - heck of a smart little idea, I thought.

10:28 PM  
Blogger The Idea Dude said...

Thanks for stopping by, Michael. I've done crazy things myself by making really cool company names that's spelt differently but pronounced the same like abstraxions. Unfortunately, I spent my entire life telling people how to spell it!

9:15 AM  

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