ESP Game

Nice use of online game framework to generate metadata:
It's a simple game -- players who visit the www.espgame.org Web site are automatically and anonymously paired up and shown photos or other images. Each player types in words that describe the image until, without seeing the other's list, they have a match. Then they are shown another image and the game repeats. The less time it takes to match words, the higher the score...The players may not realize it, but the lists of descriptive words that they're generating could eventually be used by search engines such as Google to improve Internet searches for images. They also are doing something that no computer program has ever managed to accomplish: analyzing an image and accurately describing it in words. In effect, what von Ahn is creating with his game is a giant, special-purpose supercomputer that uses human brains to do the computing. And the 24-year-old von Ahn, a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, says this approach, which he calls "Stealing Cycles from Humans," could be applied to a wide variety of problems that are too great for any individual but also beyond the capabilities of conventional computers.

CMU student taps brain's game skills