It's rather ironic that Amazon's Mechanical Turk was slammed by scam scripts over the turkey day weekend. For those that haven't hear about it yet, Mechanical Turk is an odd service that pays pennies apiece for tiny odd-jobs. The current popular task is just choosing an image from a set that will match a yellow pages address, with the hopes of matching a particular storefront to it's corresponding address. Fairly simple and low paying, right? It may have been at first. Shortly after it's appearance on /. and several other link sites, some enterprising individuals hit upon an idea to increase the efficiency by using greasemonkey scripts to lay out the images in half-sized thumbnails and zoom with a mouseover. Add a routine to make your answer one click away and, suddenly, fifty dollars per hour was a real possibility. Then came those other script writers. The unscrupulous ones. Amazon immediately instituted an anti 'bot' method of selecting 'none of the above' (the most common answer so far) and they were laid to rest. For a while. Over the holiday weekend, however, one of these script writing types threw caution to the wind and slammed over 300,000 random HITs (submissions, Human Intelligence Tasks) using up the available pool and grinding what was, to some, a fairly profitable gig. Whether or not it returns after such a meeting with at least one of the unscrupulous profiteers remains to be seen.
Oh, it's still up as a site, with some very low paying gigs available for the desperate but the cash cow (the A9 blockviews) for most users is conspicuously absent as is any information from Amazon itself. Not entirely unexpected, but then you can imagine that the blockviews were probably the reason the Mech Turk sprang forth from the depths of a focus group somewhere deep in the bowels of Amazon. It probably went something like this: #1 "Wouldn't it be cool if you could see a picture of a yellow pages listing when you were searching?" #2 "Yeah, but most places wouldn't bother sending us shit and it'd cost more than we're worth to hire that many photographers" #7 "So, stick a camera on a truck and drive around!" A few months later..... #1 "Fuck, how do we tag these pictures?? There's tons of them!" #2 "We could out-source to India." #3 "Call centers are kind of expensive, even there. The PC's alone....." #7 "Get a bunch of lazy web surfers to do it online, don't pay crap for each store to motivate them or something. There's plenty of cash-starved internet junkies right here in our backyard and they already have the computers!" #5 (Back from a long weekend of drinking) "Maybe we could farm out those product descriptions I've been working on, too." And so, the Turk was born.
7/6/2006 - Since the long gone days of Amazon sponsored projects, the Mechanical turk has become a barren wasteland filled with spammy HITS and 1 cent questionaires. The inevitable outcome.
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