Harvesting Dollars in Bloggers’ Hamlet

Currently, Wijayan and his team members are focused on creating and managing specialized websites comprising pictures of varying topics.

Kompas/Karina Isna Irawan

Three women work on laptops in Menowo village, Magelang, Central Java, on Nov. 3. Menowo village is known as Blogger Village because most of its residents work online.

Siti Sofiyah, 34, sat facing her laptop in her recently completed house. Her eyes were focused on the monitor while her right hand deftly clicked and moved the mouse around. The seemingly simplistic activity has brought her more money than when she was working as a migrant maid in Saudi Arabia.

Sitiworked with her laptop for five hours on Nov. 3. Together with two of her friends, the mother of one was marking several pictures to pass the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (Captcha). In the challenge, she needed to click on several pictures, such as those of traffic signs, types of buildings or animals. Captcha is a challenge-response test to make sure that a computer user is human instead of a machine or a programmed bot.