If you haven’t heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk, I highly suggest you check it out so you are aware of one of the more interesting pieces of web technology out there today. Basically, it’s a web service that allows you to programmatically allow humans to perform small bits of work for you. An example would be integrating your blog with MT (Mechanical Turk) in such a way that each new blog comment was reviewed by a human and he/she decided if it was spam or not, and marked it appropriately–all of it happening automatically.
What makes the whole thing interesting is that these “turks” are performing these simple actions for extremely small bits of money. Say, $0.01 - $1.00 per action. This whole concept is one type of Crowd Sourcing.
I’ve been kicking around a few concepts for websites that make use of this small army of dedicated servants willing to perform mundane tasks at a cut rate. I’ve become rather addicted to playing around with different types of actions and seeing the kind of results I receive. Once you fund your account with even a few dollars, you can start creating “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks). I think my addiction stems from the quick results. Within minutes, results start to come in.
Most recently, I’ve been asking different types of questions just to see the responses I get. For a few dollars, you can get a couple hundred responses within an hour or two. The downside to using this system for surveys is the demographics of the respondents are unknown (unless you put questions in your HIT about the respondent).
The coolest use of this technology I’ve seen has to be the search for Steve Fossett using Amazon Mechanical Turk to let hundreds of people pour over updated satellite images searching for signs of the plane wreckage. This particular HIT was unpaid and I did about 12 of them (I didn’t find anything). Regardless of the results, this was a very creative use and practical application of the technology.
If you have a great idea on how to use Mechanical Turk or other Amazon Web Services, enter the $50,000 Amazon Web Services Start-up Contest.
One of my favorite parts of being a web worker is stumbling across a truly good website that you’d never heard of before. This happened to me yesterday by way of Douglas Karr’s Marketing Technology blog. A fellow named David Airey has been blogging about graphic design for 1 year now and is celebrating his success with a ton of prizes.
First, let me say that if you are into graphic design at all, you need to check out his blog (and, no, my writing a positive review doesn’t get me an extra entry into the contest). Contests like this are great because it will get him more exposure, but from what I’ve seen so far, I would have subscribed to his feed even without the contest (had I found him another way). To earn an Alexa ranking of 24,654 in a year’s time is quite impressive.
About the contest… There are 3 main prizes and many smaller prizes. The “gold” prize winner gets a logo design from David, a custom Wordpress theme design from Nate Whitehill, a personal marketing plan from Maki of Dosh Dosh, one year’s hosting from I Love Typography, and a signed copy of Blogging Tips by Lorelle VanFossen.
Some of the other notable prizes are:
Even after the contest is over, I highly suggest you check out David Airey’s blog.
I have to admit, I’m a sucker for gadgets. Especially ones that use super secret complex algorithms to generate numbers that protect my online bank account.
Every 30 seconds, this compact device generates a new 6-digit code that is used to log in to my PayPal account. The algorithm is tied to a unique device id, so only numbers generated from my device will work.
I’m not sure exactly how small it is, but the PayPal website claims you can easily fit it on your keychain.
The cost is $5 and shipping takes about 10 days. I’ve already ordered mine and will post a follow-up on my experience with it.
Is it wrong that I’m doing this as much for the “wow” factor as I am the added security? What’s next–wireless thumb scanners?
This is the first post in a multi-part series on low-cost, high-return methods of hyper-local advertising.
Call it targeted advertising. Call it audience demographics. I call it hyper-local. One of the nice side-effects of this rush to create (and join) a myriad of social networks is all the user meta information that is being collected. The very premise behind most social (and even professional) online networks is connecting you with others like you. This, inherently, requires the user give up some key information about themselves. Seemingly innocent bits of descriptive data that marketers big and small drool over such as where you live, what college you went to, what professional industry you’re in, or even what kinds of things do you look for online. Increasingly, these bits of info are being used to sell hyper-local advertising opportunities to… anyone.
Sure, demographics-based marketing has been around forever. The key trend happening today is the combination of companies amassing this data in large quantities and then turning around and selling targeted advertising opportunities a la carte. Let my first example show you what I’m talking about.
Example 1: Facebook
With 39 million active users, Facebook has the potential to provide a wide range of options when it comes to advertising. If you visit their advertising section take a look at “Flyers.” Flyers are small ads that appear on the side of the page for users of Facebook. Facebook refers to them as self-serve advertising because you can put together a highly targeted ad in relatively short order. You can isolate your campaign by network (such as a specific city or university), and also by demographic data such as gender, age, undergraduate, graduate, etc.
What makes this advertising method so useful is the price point and the low barrier of entry. In a matter of minutes, I can put together a highly targeted ad and pay as little as $5.00 to distribute my electronic flyer to 2,500 Facebook users. Or, you can go much bigger and pay $200 for 100,000 flyer impressions per day. Facebook now offers a pay-per-click model that lets you set a daily budget and a top amount you’re willing to pay per click.
Example 2: StumbleUpon
Even at 1/10th the size of Facebook, StumbleUpon has a similar targeting scheme that allows you to really zoom in on the types of users that you want to advertise to. Their advertisers page gives you access to all the categories of pages that their users “stumble” through. They also tell you how many thousands of users are active in each category, which is helpful in trying to decide where to focus your campaign. Once you select a category, you can then further drill down and select users by country, state, and even a limited list of major cities. You can go one step further by specifying a gender.
You simply fund your account with as little as $5 and you can begin your campaign. StumbleUpon will automatically insert your specified URL into their user’s stumbles in the category you selected. An additional feature of StumbleUpon is access to how users have rated your site (thumbs up or thumbs down). This is great for a couple reasons. First, it allows you to better judge how effective your landing page is. Also, if your site gets enough thumb’s up, it can potentially make it into heavy rotation in the normal StumbleUpon system (for free).
Next time, we’ll look at a couple other hyper-local advertising methods and review some tips on maximizing the effectiveness of your campaign.
One of the more time consuming (and annoying) parts of doing freelance work is keeping track of time and money. For a long time, I had a large Excel spreadsheet that was broken up by client and project. At first, it worked fine. But, as I added more clients and more jobs, it became a nightmare to keep updated and organized.
For a while, I started using Side Job Track for free. It was leaps and bounds above my Quicken and Excel solution. While I still recommend Side Job Track for people to try, the latest project tracking service I’m using is almost perfect.
FreshBooks is awesome. It automatically does many things I was doing manually in the past. I’ll list my 3 favorite features that keep me a loyal customer.
1. Time tracking and invoicing
Plain and simple, time tracking saves me time and money. Create clients, add projects and then launch the time tracking tool to record your time as you work. When you’re done, the time is logged in the right place. You can even log time directly by telling FreshBooks how much time you spent on any specific project or item. What really makes this feature a time and money saver is the ability to generate an invoice automatically using any unbilled hours for a specific project.
2. Paypal integration and recurring billing
Actually getting paid can often times be a hassle. Especially if you are billing monthly or yearly. FreshBooks makes this easy. For example, if I charge a client $120 per year for web hosting I can set up an recurring invoice that will automatically generate and send that client an invoice. This is a lifesaver considering how forgetful I am. In addition to this, you can link FreshBooks to your Paypal account (or other service) and let your clients pay you online via Paypal.
3. Reports
Having access to all my activity over the past year is quite helpful. I can see where my money came from, how much time I spent on each project, etc. This can also be useful for tax purposes and learning how long it takes you to complete certain tasks, on average.
There are plenty of other great features that make FreshBooks worthwhile. I highly suggest it to anyone who is looking to simplify time tracking and invoicing for their freelancing business. And the best part is you can use it for free (up to 3 clients).
If so, you’ll probably be interested in a website that has just launched called BetaJunkie.com. The basic premise of the site is to connect startup web companies who need people to beta test new web apps with people who enjoy being “early adopters” and beta testing.
The site is still new and building up a list of interested beta testers. After signing up and logging in, you are asked to complete a very short profile page that gives some basic demographic information. That information will be used to help companies better target potential beta testers of their products. The privacy policy for BetaJunkie.com specifies that the info collected is not used to personally identify anyone, but only used in summary or aggregate. The site never asks for your name–or anything more personally identifiable than your email address. Everything else is like gender, household income, technical ability, etc.
I love getting to be one of the first to try out new programs and web apps, so this would be a great service if it could hook people up with quality, undiscovered web startups. And, as a web developer, having a centralized website where I could get a few hundred beta testers to try out my new web app would be a godsend. My guess is there are plenty of small or part-time web developers out there that can’t afford “real” testing or much advertising. Something like this would really help their development process.
Check it out and see what you think: BetaJunkie.com
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