Friday, November 04, 2005
Stress-Testing The Mechanical Turk
Amazon has a new web-tool named The Mechanical Turk (TMT). Right now the site's getting slammed due to people talking about it at Slashdot and Digg (and now my site).
Once things settle down TMT looks like it'll be a fairly painless way to make a little spare change. What you do is this: complete a mundane task, get a few cents. For instance, I've made a dollar looking at 34 sets of pictures, trying to find one that has a decent image of a business storefront.
Most pictures seem to have been taken in a moving vehicle w/ GPS data linked to the pictures; then a business is matched to the GPS data and you try and find if a decent picture was captured. In a lot of cases the GPS data seems to be off. A half dozen shots of a parking lot come up instead of a business. In one case a semi-truck was parked in front of the business, blocking the camera's view (you could see street numbers on the businesses on either side).
Right now it can take five minutes or so to get a photo set (or get your response submitted), so the time/pay ratio is frustratingly low (mostly the time factor; can't get bent out of shape about the three cents per task). Still, if you're surfing wirelessly watching the tube you can make stoop labor money reclining in your Barcalounger. (Oh lighten up Cesar Chavez, go haunt someone else.)
If you're tight on Christmas cash this year, check it out (you can sign up for an e-mail alert that'll let you know when system-use levels out).
Once things settle down TMT looks like it'll be a fairly painless way to make a little spare change. What you do is this: complete a mundane task, get a few cents. For instance, I've made a dollar looking at 34 sets of pictures, trying to find one that has a decent image of a business storefront.
Most pictures seem to have been taken in a moving vehicle w/ GPS data linked to the pictures; then a business is matched to the GPS data and you try and find if a decent picture was captured. In a lot of cases the GPS data seems to be off. A half dozen shots of a parking lot come up instead of a business. In one case a semi-truck was parked in front of the business, blocking the camera's view (you could see street numbers on the businesses on either side).
Right now it can take five minutes or so to get a photo set (or get your response submitted), so the time/pay ratio is frustratingly low (mostly the time factor; can't get bent out of shape about the three cents per task). Still, if you're surfing wirelessly watching the tube you can make stoop labor money reclining in your Barcalounger. (Oh lighten up Cesar Chavez, go haunt someone else.)
If you're tight on Christmas cash this year, check it out (you can sign up for an e-mail alert that'll let you know when system-use levels out).
Mikesell
1 Snarky Remarks:
Sounds interesting. But I' so sick right now. I was supposed to be in bed all day, but I got this grand idea to catch on cleaning the house and reading and writing and blogging and now i'm waiting to toss more cookies. hold my hand, Chris. Flu sucks rocks.
Unknown, at 6:50 PM
