Spam sucks – we all know that. While captcha certainly helps, it also alienates lots of folks. As a society, we’ve never been good at recognizing disabilities. I remember watching a near-blind computer user try to get past captchas and i felt terrible for what our industry does. Yet, i had never felt the frustration. Until today. The Webby Awards uses captcha on every vote. I wanted to vote for Cute Overload (omg… sooo cute) so i created an account to vote. It took me only 2 tries to get passed the first captcha. But the captcha that i got on Blog-Culture took me SEVEN tries to get right. I tried voting for two more categories – i got past the second one after 5 tries and then took another 8 to get past the next one. I gave up on voting. I wonder how many people stop participating because of stupid stuff like this? I’m trying to imagine my grandmother on her model dealing with captcha – that would so never happen (unless it looked like a Solitaire game).

Since i’m thinking about Cute Overload, i might as well share the picture from today that made me ooh and awww: