Turking for a Living

Imagine working any hours you please.

And never being late, just simply working when you feel like it. Plus you can take vacation whenever you wish and as much as you want without having to give notice. Heck you can even live anywhere with a decent internet connection.

This could be the life of someone that Turks for a living.

Of course I wouldn't dare try this without some money saved up. But if you are currently doing a minimum wage job and the prices on mTurk went up a little. Why not? Even if for no other reason then to say "Hey I Turk for a living!".

Of course I definately wouldn't go out on such a limb quite yet. Perhaps give mTurk another 6 months and you could. Maybe a breed of Turk Bums could be born? Highly skilled workers that have figured out how to do some steady task on mTurk super-fast and so they only work a few hours a day. That'd be a sweet life.

Let's keep dreaming.

Inspired by Jonathan's Comment on this thread

Janurary Status (This post is mostly a rant)

So I haven't posted in quite a while. I had a few things I felt like talking about or making pretty graphs to make, but I haven't found the motive (I mean the time!)

Amazon recently sent out an email to all registered Turkers (we believe), meaning a number of people who had long forgot about mTurk have come back and seen the new HITs.

And really mTurk's HIT offerings are a bit different. Geospatial Vision continues to stun me with excellent flash powered HITs though for 50 images 8 cents seems a little cheap. But that's with all HITs.

CastingWords continues to post it's HITs with only slight changes over the months. (And some new types ever once in a while like Assess Audio Quality)

Von Kemplen seems to be quiet, though when they do post HITs it's often under a different name.

So all and all mTurk is quiet. Still no major new use but a worker could certainty make a few bucks an hour in their free time on it (as opposed to playing a game or going out and spending money to fill one's free time)

Personnaly....I think that how much one could make an hour could go up quite a bit with a specialize "client" that would have plugins for different HITs, and do a number of things to increase the speed of work. But scrapping the info is a pain and Amazon has yet to release the "Worker API".

But I'm confident that this year we be one of growth for mTurk. Though probably still not as energetic as the energy behind Amazon's S3 and EC2.