This one is unexpected. Oh No Robot is a search engine where users transcribe web comics, and you can then search the transcribed text. Surprise: It actually works. In less than 7 days, they have managed to add over 7000 transcriptions. This once again shows that users are willing to add value to a free service if they are provided with easy to use tools to do so.

For comics which have joined the program, you will occasionally see little buttons like this at the bottom:

If you click the button, you can enter a transcription:

The artist can moderate the incoming transcriptions. Oh No Robot then indexes these transcriptions and makes them searchable. A very cool idea; sadly, the added transcriptions are not available under a free license. What is it good for? Finding comics you vaguely remember is the most obvious application. But I think if this scales, it’s quite likely that commercial services for licensing comics on certain topics will be built on it; finding editorial cartoons on certain topics is one example.

Alas, it’s unlikely that Google Print will add anything similar to its scanned pages soon ;-). (Actually, Google Print is vulnerable to distributed transcription or OCR attacks, which is why Google does not index all pages of copyrighted books — a subset always remains unavailable to all users.)

I think these kinds of ideas could be collected on a new page called “[[edit:Distributed work|distributed work]]” in the wiki.