Amazon.com is very very cool
Ok, I love amazon. Comparable to google. But where google have nice little things that are free, amazon has these great things that you pay a little bit of money for. I just found out about this thing called “Amazon Mechanical Turk“. You can do what the call HITs – “Human Intelligence Tasks – are individual tasks that you work on”. So, instead of having something like a programming job or whatever that you send you a computer, you can make a job that really has to be done by a human being and you pay them a little bit of money for it.
Here are just a few examples of HITs that workers have completed on Mechanical Turk.
Select the correct spelling for these search terms
Is this website suitable for a general audience?
Find the item number for the product in this image
Rate the search results for these keywords
Are these two products the same?
Choose the appropriate category for products
Categorize the tone of this article
Translate a paragraph from English to French
Or, eg “Description: Play a game in your browser for five minutes, then rate the game’s quality and provide a few sentences of advice for the game’s author.” – Time Allotted: 2 hours – Reward: $0.20
I’m not sure how getting $.20 is worth spending 2 hours, but maybe you get $.20 for each game you play or something.
I just think it is an awesome way of making a whole new type of processing power available to people. There is no way you can give that play a game for 5 minutes task to a computer.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, the few can ruin it for the many. As per this article. It looks like people are putting up requests for people to digg things or to sign up for things or add people as friends on myspace etc.
Still, this is an amazing idea and as with everything I am excited to see where this could lead.
