Amazon Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is one of the most interesting things I’ve come across online, and a good way to make a little money in your free time. People post little jobs, called HITs, to the site and pay you for completing them. I’m especially fond of the Castingwords podcast transcription hits, as they tend to pay decently well per time spent. The most interesting thing to me, however, is that programs can be made to automatically request HITs on the site. This could lead to some very interesting applications, if done right… but no one really has yet, in my opinion, other than perhaps Castingwords (their system is mostly automated, although it does have human intervention throughout).

~ by akerasi on 9 August, 2007.