Amazon's Mechanical Turk

OPW - Jan 4 - Courtland Brooks did a preliminary study of Amazon's Mechanical Turk service recently. We wondered if it was appropriate to use this service for profile approvals. Probably not. However, you can see the study at the Courtland Brooks blog, here.  

Last month saw the launch of CrowdFlower, an interesting venture that applies Dolores Labs’ Labor-as-a-Service platform to the non-profit “micro employment” foundation Samasource. We’ve previously covered web-based labor and outsourcing services — notably Shorttask and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — that match-make workers and tasks, and I’ve been critical of the unsustainable [...]  

Amazon.com executive Sharon Chiarella used a presentation at the Global Sourcing Forum and Expo in New York City to extol the benefits of crowdsourcing for organizations, citing the companies using Amazon.coms Mechanical Turk platform. Mechanical Turk enlists massive online crowds to help companies complete tasks. - NEW YORK – A million strangers could benefit a company more than a handful of highly trained employees, at least if you...  

My husband was unemployed and the recession loomed large. Learn how Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk) helped me earn over $1,400 in seven months. Read my story.Contributor: Carolyn BlevinsPublished: Nov 21, 2009  

I know Amazon Mechanical Turk is sort of gimmicky and sometimes shady. I know that the rates can make working in a sweat shop seem lucrative. But I transfered my $6.95 over to an Amazon.com gift card and bought my next book club book used for a total Read More......(read more)  

Crowdsourcing's power to compartmentalize and abstract away the true meaning of tasks could potentially entice people into participating in a covert project that they otherwise wouldn't support, using a tool such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, says Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18315-innovation-the-sinister-powers-of-crowdsourcing.html)  

If you could earn virtual coin in exchange for doing simple real world tasks, would you do it? Now there's a way to find out: Gambit, a company that specializes in monetizing social gaming, has teamed with Crowdflower, which manages crowd-sourced tasks for clients to create a weirdly novel hybrid system. Players who complete tasks for Crowdflower companies can earn social gaming credits in exchange for their work.The system, dubbed Gambit...  

Adds the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing capability to Joomla. It allows you to create and review HIT's for a site evaluation. Date Updated: 2009-11-04 Developer: MrRoyce Tags: internet, joomla APIs: Amazon Mechanical Turk, PayPal  

10 Ways Small Businesses Can Harness Big Crowds by Ross Kimbarovsky, co ...Small Business News (blog)What it is: Mechanical turk is a marketplace for getting various tasks performed by distributed groups of people. Tasks posted to Mechanical Turk are ...  

Amazon.com Pushes Benefits Of CrowdsourcingeWEEK Europe UKIn the case of Amazon.com and its Mechanical Turk, the online retailer's vice president Sharon Chiarella told the audience at the Global Sourcing Forum and ...  

Being interested in, and recently done a fair bit of reading about, human subjects research, this article from a couple of months ago about using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for running human subjects experiments caught my eye.  

Amazon Web Services Announces Expansion into Asia in the First Half of 2010WELT ONLINE... Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.and more »  

Practical EcommerceTop Ten Low Cost Ways to Improve Site UsabilityPractical EcommerceI dug a little deeper into their offering and it seems the feedback comes from workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Started by Amazon, Mechanical ...  

Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Relational Database Service - a ...Reuters... Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront. ...  

AmazonEncore to Release Three Books in FebruaryWELT ONLINE... Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.and more »