Paylancers

Dogsourcing

2008-04-01T09:39:00.002-04:00

On April 1st, the Amazon team published findings from a groundbreaking experiment:"A couple of weeks ago Martin and I arrived at the office at about the same time. He was trying to get Rufus to settle down. Rufus wasn't cooperating and Martin told me that Rufus was a bit bored. Jokingly I suggested that we could probably train Rufus to do some Mechanical Turk HITS."If your company is interested

We're Exporting Jobs to... Milwaukee?

2008-03-11T20:21:00.009-04:00

Outsourcing in high-tech companies has become a familiar enough cliché - it's regular fodder for network TV news, and even Homer Simpson's had his 2 cents. So when Jason Calcanis of Mahalo published a list of 17 tips for start-ups and added outsourcing as #18 ;) it was no surprise. But the destination was.From Calcanis' blog:Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living

Intro to Amazon's Mechanical Turk

2007-05-01T06:07:00.010-04:00

Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing network set-up by Amazon. The service gives you access to a network of freelancers, who log-in to an online system and can pick and choose tasks to work on. The key distinction: unlike Elance and other outsource portals, Mechanical Turk is aimed at piecework, not entire projects.There's an e-commerce set-up on both ends. Tasks are uploaded by "requesters" -

Mechanical Turk Workers Mostly US-Based

2006-12-01T21:21:00.003-05:00

I've got some results to share from a questionaire deployed on Mechanical Turk to gather stats and feedback from the Turk workforce.Here's a taste of the info gathered from the first 100 responses: a breakdown of country of origin. As suspected, Amazon's U.S.-centric payment system has resulted in a mostly-U.S. workforce, but a few workers from elsewhere are participating.I also see this same

Influencing an Election with Crowdsourcing

2006-10-26T14:15:00.003-04:00

An article in the New York Times highlighted an interesting new political tactic: campaign resources are being used to promote certain newspaper articles online, such that they appeared at the top of a Google search for a candidate's name.This makes for a powerful propaganda tool. For example, a Democrat could promote a negative article on her Republican challenger, such that it appeared #1 in

Feedback from the Welcome Mat

2006-10-18T18:09:00.003-04:00

Last week I set-up a Welcome Mat HIT group on Mechanical Turk, to announce the Paylancers blog and gather feedback from workers. I received some interesting comments about both the site and Mturk in general."Very interesting. . . mainly because I didn't even know that this stuff (i.e., Mechanical Turk, "crowdsourcing") even existed before today.""I didn't realize that Mturk was still not drawing

HIT Groups as Welcome Mats

2006-10-13T16:01:00.004-04:00

As an experiment, I posted a "My 2 Cents" HIT group on Mechanical Turk to announce this blog to Mturk workers. In the space of a few minutes, I've already gotten some very interesting feedback - including some comments that suggest the "Read More" links on every post aren't visible enough. So it's doing double-duty as a promotional tool and a focus group.

New PHP Tools for Mechanical Turk

2006-10-13T14:43:00.003-04:00

Santa Cruz Tech has just released a first draft of their PHP code for Mechanical Turk. This will help take some of the burden off developers trying to code applications that tap into Mturk.Santa Cruz joins DPA, which has had its HIT-Builder tool out for several months. The two tool sets are very different: HIT-Builder is a full-blown web interface for Mturk, whereas Santa Cruz's work only covers

Beer Money: Mechanical Turk on Campus

2006-10-11T13:27:00.003-04:00

A constant issue in the Mechanical Turk community is the rate of pay: given the low prices of HITs, and the time it takes to execute them, many people have complained that - even at breakneck speed - they're having a hard time hitting minimum wage.Others take a more casual attitude, saying that Mturk is an online pastime like blogging,

Cottage In, Cottage Out

2006-10-05T21:20:00.003-04:00

Amazon probably hopes that Mechanical Turk will evolve to the point where large companies will jump in, dumping 6- and 7-figure HIT groups into the mix. But for now, it's a cottage industry on both ends of the transaction. Should Amazon do more to foster small-scale Turking? And (more critically for Amazon) are they stuck with it?Corporate IT departments are strange creatures. As individuals, IT

Qual-Snatching on Mechanical Turk

2006-10-05T18:14:00.002-04:00

Can companies borrow other Requester's Qualifications to perform their own HITs? Technically, yes. But is this how the system should work? Isn't the time spent defining your workforce part of your selling proposition, and shouldn't you be able to protect that?Right now, only a few firms have bothered to define qualifications for the tasks they need performed. For the most part, these companies

Beta Rot at Mechanical Turk?

2006-10-05T17:35:00.002-04:00

After the initial buzz and a few decent follow-up articles, Mechanical Turk has fallen into relative obscurity. While Techcrunchers revel at start-ups whose claim-to-fame is a groovy nav menu, the Turk - revolutionary as it is - gets no air time. Even turk bloggers are hard pressed to come-up with rant-worthy material. (Although there's no shortage of criticism from outside observers.)Is Amazon's

Welcome to Paylancers

2006-10-04T14:56:00.002-04:00

The purpose of this blog is to keep track of trends in outsourcing and crowdsourcing, with a special emphasis on Mechanical Turk. I've been a frequent Requester and occassional Worker on Mturk since December 2005, and am very optimistic that it will eventually change the way freelancers work online.