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.
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