Mturk
From Networked Advocacy
MTurk
(extracted directly from "We are Smarter than Me", pp 9-10)
Jeff Bezos found yet another role for Amazon's huge community: in 2005, Bezos created a Web site to enroll volunteers in the task of finding duplicates among the millions of Amazon Web pages 0 a task that his software could not handle. The volunteers were given a few cents for each duplicate page they found. The process worked well, so Bezos turned it into a business. The Web site was renamed Mturk.com, and Amazon invited software developers to tap into it for such tasks as finding specific objects in photos, translating text, and judging the beauty of a scene or object...
Amazon has more than 100,000 so-called Turk workers today, in more than 100 countries. They are paid only pennies for their HITs (human intelligence tasks), and Bezos has been criticized for running a virtual sweatshop.
But the workers seem willing enough. Some see it as a kind of hobby, or a virtual jigsaw puzzle. One disabled veteran told a reporter that he could earn about $100 a week by working two hours a day for the Turk, and he called it "a form of therapy to get [him] used to working again."
The Turk's customers are satisfied too. iConclude, a software company that sells automated programs to troubleshoot and repair information technology networks, posted a request on Mturk.com for one simple procedure and got replies from 300 programmers. Sunny Gupta, iConclude's CEO, says he got the job done for one-tenth what it would have cost in his own shop - and after the volunteers were paid, the Turk's fee was just an additional 10 percent.
The Advocacy Angle
In 2007, Turk started to think of "Social good" use of the service. They took a bunch of new satellite images of the huge search area, broke it into smaller chunks. Turk then had more than 50,000 volunteers look at randomly distributed segments. The results were mixed but the fact that they could get 50,000 people to contribute skill and intelligence was a huge example of what is to come.
