One of our developers, Lincoln, forward me an interesting article today from the Examiner.com site. It was about one potential future for CAPTCHA, the things where you have to type in a word in order to prove you're not a robot spammer. Really what you're doing is proving you have the amazing ability to tell the difference between a lowercase "L" and a "1" or and "i" when distorted and placed over a background of the same color (great skill to have).

Anyhow, advertisers realized that people have to look at that little box on sites. And if you look at it, advertisers want to put an ad on it. Here's a video describing the plan:

I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty cool. Especially if the ads are targeted and relevant to the type of site. To use the example from the video, the detergent would be a great ad for someone commenting on a blog about...laundry? Well, you get the point.

So what do you think? Is this genius, or just another annoyance? I vote genius, unless people start putting CAPTCHA on unnessecary things just to serve up more ads. I mean, I'm all for getting rid of comments like this, which keep popping up on our blog (meaning someone is actually taking the time to do them manually, since we have CAPTCHA):

"Thanks was looking forwards to such a info.What took you so long fot sharing it.Very essential from SEO point of view!!Hope to see such a informative stuff in future!!"

It can't be spam if it's praising me, can it? ;)