Mechanical Turk Monitor

Edit Assistant - Transcript Editing Tool

2007-02-26T18:18:00.000-08:00

Edit Assistant is an automatic filter and speaker identifying tool written by me.

I wrote this tool to help those who perform CastingWords Edit HITs, but it is also helpful for editing your own transcripts before you turn them in to get a higher score (which you want for bonus based HITs to get paid more and plus higher grades mean you get a higher score which will allow you to do those elusive Expedited HITs which pay way more then normal HITs).

I hope those of you who edit find it useful. But remember you still need to listen through the audio, this just helps with some of the mindless work.

via my post on Turker Nation

You Can Help Find Jim Gray (from home)

2007-02-02T22:32:00.000-08:00

Repost from Werner's blog

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.
Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.
This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.
The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.
I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.
Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

If everyone completes a few of these HITs, we will get through all of them. And possibly find something that will help find him.

Turking for a Living

2007-01-29T18:33:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-01-18T18:21:00.000-08:00

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.

Merry Christmas Turkers! (And Requesters!)

2006-12-24T14:37:00.000-08:00

So it's Christmas! (Well tomorrow is) I hope you've got all your shopping done (I still need to start my wrapping!)

As far as mTurk lately, we've had thousands of Tagging HITs from Amazon which basically just fix it's product labeling system (Awesome use of mTurk). And then of course the Unspun HITs have been steadily entering the stream. And of course there's been little bit of this and that.

But let's forget about work! And just enjoy a Merry Christmas with family (Get along with them! I know it can be hard!)

So, I'm simply rambling here, but hey, have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. And of course during this busy time of year, remember the holidays are about fun with friends and family, not stressing out over having enough time to get everything done. Make cuts if needed and smell the flowers. And in worst case scenario post HITs to get your work done! Heh.

Have a good one. :-)

Get Paid to Pirate!

2006-12-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a new use of mTurk that I haven't seen before from Nat. He'll pay you a whole 15 cents to:

Find entire The Handing Down by Ed Gerhard in MP3 Format and upload it here.

So, I tried checking to make sure the song isn't in public domain and I don't see any evidence that it is. In fact, here you can go get the album it's in, for 15 bucks.

So Nat, I like your creativity. But if you want to pirate some songs, go get Limewire and leave the Turkers out of it.

Thanks.

The Sheep Market: Two Cents Worth

2006-11-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

Aaron Koblin has published his thesis paper on the rather intriguing Sheep Market project.

To be honest, it is a little over my head, but still a good read. He brings up the very valid point about how, things like his Sheep Market, are clearly not worth the wage provided. Yet Turkers complete the tasks. The only thing truely comparable to his project is the YRUHRN book. Another half-experiment/half project that used the Mechanical Turk.

So just what does motivate the Turkers? What motivates someone playing a game? Seriously, the video game industry is huge and the sole purpose of most of the games is simply to get to the next level. Now, some do have intriguing storylines and other stuff of that sort. But if gamers simply wanted that, they could go watch a movie.

The high point of my Turking, and all of the old Turkers was the Image Adjustments. Semi-mindless tasks that we did over and over for 3 cents (in November of 2005). We did however make decent wages (6-12 bucks depending on your setup) But what was the point? Was there any pride in doing it? From my standpoint, no, it was just about the money.

Now, you could put HITs on mTurk into a two groups.

Group A: Mindless tasks that one couldn't take pride in, essentially tasks with right and wrong answers. Like "Is there a person in this picture? Yes | No"

Group B: Mindful tasks, like drawing a sheep, transcribing a podcast, giving advice, Ranking Your Top 3 of something. These are basically HITs with an very large or infinite number of right answers. In fact in reviewing of HIT results you see the personality of Turkers with these sorts of tasks. To the point that you sometimes recognize who did some work without checking the Worker ID.

Now Group B tasks degrade into Group A tasks when they become repetitive. For instance, if all of the sudden, I am drawing 100 sheep a day, 7 days a week, then sheep drawing has become a mindless task for me.

And so, I think this is a solution that Automated Webshoring can give us. In life there will always be repetitive tasks. Most lower paying jobs (and many higher paying jobs) become just a sea of mindless work for employees. Now you learn to live with it and technology has ridden us of some of it (copy machines!). But what if we "Websource" unskilled labor, by breaking down the tasks we give workers the ability to choose what they do, on a momentary basis. So one minute I'm a Fast Food worker taking an order, the next I'm helping a child with there homework, then I'm typing a license plate number from a picture taken by a red light camera, and then I'm typing out a small chunk of a podcast.

Now granted, some of this is down the road....some might not even be on the road. But to me, it seems like a bright future. It seems like it's something that could change the world, perhaps for the better, perhaps for worst. But one thing is for sure, our systems will keep getting smarter, faster, and more efficient by whatever path companies find.

via AWS Blog (Yes I know it took me a week to finish writing the post)

Contracts and Mortage Lookups are Flooding my Window!

2006-11-29T14:23:00.000-08:00

Lately whenever I visit mTurk (which is often), the top of it is flooded with a bunch of HITs that I have no interest in. And most Turkers don't have any interest in them either or they'd be disappearing at a decent rate.

Now you've all seen the "Mortage Lookups" from Enrovia Research. The issue with these is they take a long time and pay next to nothing.

And then there's the newer but similar HITs, "Contract details" from JB (JB is actually an Amazon Employee, note the @amazon.com email address)

For those unfamiliar with these two HIT types, in a nutshell you go to another website, find scanned records, and then extract information from those.

Now I personally think both of these HITs should pay more, so do all of you. So does everyone. We've already established that for all HITs. But business is business, you pay the smallest amount possible to get your work done.

The issue I have isn't the pay, the issue is that these HITs could be simplified with programming. They have workers manually go to a site and lookup documents that could be scrapped and put into an HIT, or the Requesters could release a tool to quicken the process (remember those Greasemonkey scripts). Or even simply make these into External HITs (HITs not hosted on mTurk but appear to be) and inside the HIT have a frame that takes users to the site so they don't have to deal with having multiple windows/tabs.

Something that many Requesters seem to miss is that the trick to mTurk isn't high pay, but rather simplification. Break tasks down as much as possible, into very small, very quick, 1 or 2 cent HITs. Even if the only way to break them down and simplify is through additional HITs (which of course can raise costs)

So Requesters do yourself a favor, stop for a moment, look at your HITs and brainstorm out how to simplify them, even if it means a week worth of programming to automate it. The time investment is worth it if you are going to be sending out thousands of HITs.

Simply put, make the task easier, and you can pay less and get results faster.
(This conclusion is based off my personal experiences as a Turker and Requester and from what I've seen on mTurk)

Blank CAPTCHAs! Freeze your Turking!

2006-11-27T12:53:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I was innocently just plowing through a bunch of Survey Verification HITs, and then BAM! I get a blank CAPTCHA. I was using Firefox....and was stunned, I had read about this issue before on Turker Nation. But I figured it had since been resolved.

I'm unsure still of what causes this issue, but I hope they address it soon because it sucks when you are on a roll and then stuck.

The fix is simple, go into IE, and accept an HIT, and the CAPTCHA will be visible, you simply type it in. Below I've attached the images to prove that one is blank and I'm not blind (also so that the mTurk developers that read this blog can look at them if this is an unknown issue)

Can You Speak Italian?

2006-11-02T22:13:00.000-08:00

von Kempelen sure hopes you can! 12 HITs have shown up that pay varying rates. Exactly how much per paragraph I have no idea, because you can't see these HITs without accepting them and you can't accept them without an English to Italian L1 Qualification Score of 50 or more. Granted my Italian is far weaker then my English (aka me no speakie italianie), but I do love pizza. Does that count von Kempelen? Come on....please? No? Darn.

But seriously it's nice to see these sorts of HITs on mTurk. Paying for translation work is expensive, but there's tons of people out there that are bilingual (most of Europe last I heard). And if you are actually fluent in two languages, it seems to me like it'd be a semi-effortless job (yes?...no?). Or say you are trying to become fluent and you have a pretty good grasp, you just need some experience, translation HITs would be a great way to get it. And pass the time and make a little cash while you are at it. Then once you got the hang of 7 languages or so, go get a nice 6 digit job with some company.

Happy 1st Birthday mTurk!!! WOOT!!!!

2006-11-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

So today, mTurk has turned the big 1. That's right 1 year ago, on November 2nd mTurk launched. The net went crazy..."Wait...I can sit here in my underwear and get paid? No way." But it was true, there was so much excitement about mTurk that the servers were down half the time for the first week after launch. Granted mTurk has now gotten off to a slow start, the Turkers all hang out at Turker Nation and there's not that many of them, but it's been a fun year. Hopefully this next one will bring us many many more HITs, filled with joy and gooey stuff.

Now I had wanted to throw together like a scavenger hunt or something fun for today, but that's a lot of work, and I'm lazy. But I did make this HIT, where you can go get a whooping 5 cents (count em, 5!) for drawing a nice b-day thing for the Turk!

I am posting all the decent ones here.

And here's my favorite so far

From mTurk B-Day

Little of this, a little of that

2006-11-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

So I've had bad updater ship lately. Sorry!

First off there's a nice article on Turking by the Christian Science Monitor.
Which states that the reason AskForCents stopped was because of NowNow and Askville, afraid of some corporate competition?

Secondly, von Kemplen is actively back into mTurk, they've had some weird test HITs up, that allow you to draw right in mTurk (using VNC on EC2!!) As well I've been seeing some language translations up from them.

The YRUHRN book is great, I am somewhat disappointed in all of the Turk references, which makes it less interesting to my non-turker friends. But as a Turker it's a wonderful book that gives you insight into what sort of people the Turkers are.

That pretty much wraps things up. I'll try to get back into my regular cycle of posting like I should.

Why Are You Here - Right Now? Published!

2006-10-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet but Lifebushido has published it's book that was written by Turks called "Why Are You Here - Right Now?"

The ebook is free to download (for a limited time)
And you can get it in book form for $19.95

1/3 of the Profits from YRUHRN will go to help children affected by Hurricane Katrina.

I'll post a review on this book once I finish reading it. This is certainly one of the more creative uses of mturk.

NowNow HITs pay...0?!

2006-10-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

So I'm going through the HITs up on mTurk. And noticing that Turkers aren't doing the NowNow HITs that pay a whopping...0 cents. I noticed a few of these earlier..and figured it was a temporary thing. But seriously, I know 1 cent is next to nothing for researching a question but it's something. Where-as 0 is nothin. The idea is that you try to be the best and get the bonus. That's retard..mturk isn't a contest, it's a small-contracts spolier.

:: slaps NowNow ::

Now stop that BS.

Blog: Paylancers

2006-10-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

Check out this newer blog, Paylancers by Sherwood Stranieri.

It has a nice smooth, professional writing style that I'm sure you'll enjoy. (I'm trying to think of something witty or humorous to say...But I'm sleepily, so ya..)

Turkers are getting....Picky. Little Brats.

2006-09-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

So today Amazon reposted the "Name that Website" HITs with "(higher pay)" added to the title. They gave Turkers a whole 4 cent raise (they paid 1 cent, now they pay five) There are 6,670 posted...That is $66.70 at 1 cent and $333.50 at 5 cents, quite the difference in cost. But are the Turkers biting? Doesn't look like it so far. The HITs sound pretty simple, they give you a name from the "Rank Your Top 3" results data. And have you find the best website for the business. Simple right? But let's factor in misspellings, the fact that small businesses don't always have websites and when they do, they don't tend to list high in search engines. So it's not that easy of a job.

But looking at trends in mTurk, it looks like Turkers may simply be becoming a picky bunch, with fewer and fewer new Turkers be born because all the hype about mTurk is basically dead. The current ones have learned to stop complaining at pricing and to simply not do tasks they don't feel like doing. Heck in the last 30 days I've only done 9 HITs (But I'm a lazy Turker). Amazon has always treated the Turkers as though they were expendable...Since there are always more fish in the sea of bored people on the internet. But, apparently these fish aren't finding the bait...So the question is...Will Requesters raise prices and show a little more concern for Turkers? Doubtfully. But I can see them using better bait. Or maybe just paying for work in Chinese currency? Only time will tell. Tune in next week for "Turkers Gone Lurkin OR Chinese Takeover!" (Sorry I've been watching to much Rocky and Bullwinkle, good show though)

OMG!!! 70+ Podcasts Waiting to be Transcribed!

2006-09-08T17:02:00.000-07:00

So CastingWords has a very large number of podcasts just waiting for you to transcribe right now. This is good news for Turkers that type fast, and enjoy listening to people talk. As well it's great news for CastingWords since they appears to be getting plenty of business. Downside being apparently there aren't enough Turkers doing podcasts right now to support the load.

So tell your friends, neighbors and friendly neighbors, to stop on by the Mechanical Turk and try doing a transcription or two. Just please read the instructions thoroughly or you will get rejected. (They aren't nit-picky, if you actually read the instructions and follow them you will get paid)

I tried to get Nathan and Rachel (founders of CastingWords) to say something hilarious for me to quote them saying but I failed. So I'm going to pretend that they said in unison "I'm sick of these motherfucking Podcasts on the motherfucking PLANE!!!". Please pretend with me. (Oh and sorry about foul mouth...It's totally Samuel Jackson's fault...seriously...he's a bad influence)

Abandoned HIT Counter is...Going Crazy?

2006-09-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

via Turker Nation

I have yet to see this on my own account but apparently mTurk once again can't do basic math. Turkers are reporting that their abandoned rates are going up for no reason whatsoever (by thousands). mTurk's math has never been very good, with payment and records not matching. And the number of HITs completed being off and various other weirdness.

Exactly what causes mTurk's weird math glitches I'm not sure. I've never been much of a scripter/programmer so there may be some prevalent issues with what they are using. Or someone could've goofed somewhere. Point being Requesters don't add qualifications for abandonment rate right now (though it's not like any usually do).

Got a Light?

2006-08-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

There's been a survey type HIT up for a while (meaning everyone can do it once) from Ian McAfee, that asks you to report back the exact cost of cigarettes for big name brands where you live . And I can't help but have this thought jump into my head every time I see it, that this guy is deciding on where he is moving based on cigarette prices. Haha!

What is he seriously doing? Who knows....Perhaps he has data on how many people smoke in different regions and he's going to make a pretty graph showing the relationship between price and the number of smokers. Or maybe his son will soon be going off to college and he wants him to only apply to colleges in high priced smoking regions. Or perhaps this man is part of the "evil tobacco companies" and they plan to use this data to raise prices accordingly.

On that note, I will now insert a simple PSA. Throwing cigarette butts out of your car window can cause forest fires....Killing Bambi's friends (Bambi can't die because he is a main character and it's a kids movie).

Happy Monday Turkers!

2006-07-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

Ah Monday the worst day of the week from many....But not for me. Despite once being an avid believer in Garfield's "Mondays Suck". I now have much love for Mondays. For me they are not the start of a new work week...But rather a day to relax and watch the clouds roll by.

And of course do a little Turking....I have such HITs to choose from as Collect US school district contact information, Write a short Muslim Sci-Fi story!, Restaurant Verification, Look up information for things from various lists, Rank Your Top 3, and of course A Penny for Your Thoughts.

Now all of these HITs are pretty much fun.....None pay well...Most pay horribly...But mTurk currently is a place to hang out...And mess around and get paid while doing it. A mentality that perhaps the site should reflect. Now of course you can go through painstaking HITs such as Podcast Transcribing and make some actual dough. But if you're not low on cash and not freakishly fast at typing, Why? All of these HITs are fun...In fact I've spent hours doing much more frustrating and annoying tasks in video games with my only motive being the "privilege" of doing an even harder task.

I've read a few articles since Salon.com's article on mTurk that call mTurk a virtual sweatshop (though Salon's article is informative and doesn't take sides). Now I'm asking how so? Now I can see some mentally ill person trying to pay their bills with mTurk rather then going out and getting a job (or second job if needed)...But the fact is mTurk is a place to waste some free time, and get paid for it...Extra cash to spend on weekends. These people aren't repressed....Admittedly underpaid many times but they can easy turn there backs from such HITs and the price will go up (which I suggest doing in some cases).

And despite low prices mTurk surpassingly has yet to have any large number of foreigners living in low cost areas taking it over (that I know of...) I credit this mostly to mTurk being in English and the only payment options being transferring money to a US Bank Account and to an Amazon.com Gift Certificate balance. If I do ever hear of true "sweatshops" being setup by Americans in foreign countries to have low income workers work all day on mTurk I will be rather disturbed (unless the conditions are somehow good) But until then give it break, the Turk is great, the workers are happy (sorta...We do love to complain though). And the Requesters although they are coming slowly, keep coming. mTurk's future is bright. Keep up the good work everyone, it's been a blast...And guess what? Only 3 months or so till mTurk's B-Day (Don't check my math...)! I'll have to get Requesters to post some crazy fun HITs that day, maybe force Turkers to get the high score on some game or go through a scavenger hurt or something.

Or maybe some sort of massive puzzle that all the Turkers have to complete in 24 hours (as a team)...And if they don't....All of the HITs get rejected! (I think that's a violation of TOS...) But ya...I'll have to think up of something fun and make it happen (don't count on me though...heh) Anyways keep it up, it's been great so far.

And of course.....HAPPY MONDAY TURKERS!

HIT: Lookup People!

2006-07-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

So Amazon seems to be using mTurk to create a database of people from lists that they have collected.

The HITs pay one cent and have you research the following about a given name

Whether he/she is alive or dead.
What his/her gender is.
What his/her birthday is.
What his/her profession is.
His/her page on wikipedia.org (if one exists). Use the fully qualified URL e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Pitt
The best website (NOT on wikipedia.org) for information about the him/her. Use the full qualified URL e.g. http://bradpittrulez.com

I got Clint Eastwood from the Top Movie Directors List. The information for him was rather easy to find...

This appears to possibly be another part of the "Rank Your Top 3's". Where now they are referencing the names given. Especially considering the first question is whether or not the name is a person. Heh. Anyways have fun with these...I really don't see how 1 cent is worth someone's time....Bump it up to 3 cents and I'd be on it like crazy. But 1? When at the very least the person has to perform a search and copy and paste two links? Not the best example to other Requesters. But at the same time I guarantee the 4k of them posted will be gone within a day or two (Of July 30th).

Turk Gear

2006-07-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

So you're sitting at home in your PJ's, trying to transcribe a podcast and you're just not feeling it.

Well the issue is that you aren't surrounded with Turkness. Now if you go the Casting Words Spreadshop and buy yourself a nice Turk Shirt, and Coffee Mug and Hat. Wait a week and throw the hat on and the shirt and start drinking out of the mug...You will feel the Turkness...And the Turkness will feel you....Soon you'll be dreaming about left footed sheep and ranking the top 3 of everything....Plus your eyes will be drawn to business signs. (Yes I am just making up words as go and don't wait to finish the podcast untill your gear comes..It'll expire.)

HIT: Lookup Symbol

2006-07-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

Thousands of 1 cent HITs from lyon1727 were posted that simply requested that you lookup the company name of different stock symbols (I'm lost on the proper terminology) Here's the instructions given

Lookup the following symbol SMDI

Hurray for clarity.....

Simple enough...Though seems like he could've found this information somewhere....But perhaps 40 bucks or so seemed easier to scrap a database for it together.

Puzzles!

2006-07-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Trivia Research Department has posted a large number (700+) of HITs that have Turkers write puzzle clues for 3 cents.

Here's the one I got

Puzzle Category: Sports Puzzles
Puzzle Subcategory: NBA Star
Supportive Information:
PUZZLE ANSWER: JALEN ROSE

Write a Cryptic Clue that will be used it the above puzzle. The clue is to help the player guess the PUZZLE ANSWER

Now I have no idea who Jalen Rose is... Other then apparently a NBA player so this isn't worth 3 cents to me. But hey if you are into sports and know this sort of stuff, plus a total puzzle master in your spare time (ha, puzzle master) then I hope you jump on these HITs and have fun.

Now this is an interesting idea, let's say 700 trivia questions would take one person probably a month to write...Let's say they make 30,000 a year thus 2,500 a month then with mTurk they are only paying 21 dollars for 700 thus saving 2479 dollars if it works out....By my rough calculations. Plus it gets done way quicker. I'm surprised more businesses aren't experimenting with mTurk if these savings are as realistic as they seem.

Compliment Me!

2006-07-07T12:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, I've been lazy and haven't had a proper post in a while...Sorry. Anyways a great HIT that I noticed is entitled Compliment Me.

Here's the instructions from Kyle Consalus

Write at least a paragraph (3 sentences or more) in English that praises my character, moral strength, physical appearance, intelligence, and/or humility. Entries completely lacking in effort will be rejected, but any reasonable and attempt to compliment me would be great.
I'm male, I have brown hair and hazel eyes, and I'm generally above average.
Make me feel awesome.

Now Kyle, I don't think you are just a depressed loser with low self esteem that is paying others 10 cents to raise it. Rather I think you have some sort of a funny idea to do with these things. But this raises a lot of ideas in my mind....Like say the poor guy who sucks at writing love letters but wants to impress his wife, why not explain a few things and get one written for him. Or perhaps we can go down the road of sadness and have people post there picture and Turkers compliment them on various features like their oversized nose giving them a very defined face.

Heh. Sounds like fun. So Kyle, I'd just like to say that no matter how you feel there we always be a special place for you. I don't know where this place is....And I'll try not to care. But it's out there, try not to get in to too much trouble finding it.

Thanks for laugh.

New mTurk Features

2006-06-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

I'm really tired tonight so just read it here on the AWS Blog.

(Yes I know I'm lazy, sorry, not like I get paid or anything)

HIT: Make a Sound!

2006-05-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

Enjoy making goofy sounds? Do you often make small squeaks or squeals to express yourself? Then this HIT could be for YOU!

Basically there's a sound clip creation contest on mTurk, that gives you the vague task of making a sound clip to alert a user of some program that something is waiting for them (up to 3 seconds long). The sound will play roughly once a week. So yah...I imagine they are going to get a lot of farts, armpit noises, and the like.

But hey the HIT pays 1 dollar and you have a chance to win $500 so check it out. I suggest going for a AOL type approach (referencing "You've Got Mail")...Some attractive sounding female going "Alert! Alert!", that although at first it will sound quite lovely by the tenth time you hear it, you will want to kill the lady.

Scheduled Outage

2006-05-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

Via mTurk, "We are taking an extended outage starting May 21st at 8:00pm PDT. Please do not accept any hits that you cannot complete before that time."

Obviously this means they are deleting mTurk due to it being full of Rank your Top 3 HITs, something that only really bored woman do. Just kidding, I'm guessing they are rearranging their database system or something that primary deals with internal server type junk. That you won't notice except in that error pages will become a rare sighting...Or a common one. Or there might be some changes to the interface and API and junk...I don't know.

Who knows....Just don't start crying when you login at 8:01pm Sunday and can't spend the next 2 hours transcribing a podcast of a guy talking about how much he misses his cat that was recently ran over and then goes on to rant about how his wife leaving him was his mother's fault and then later to top it off is so drunk that he throws up on his keyboard....

You just won't be able to have that much fun Sunday night...Sorry. So hey go out on the town and do some research for those Rank Your Top 3 HITs, figure out just wear the best place is to get drunk, go Go-carting and sneak a kiss in Seattle. (Hint: It's not your house)

The Sheep Market

2006-05-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

Remember drawing all those sheep? Well here's the result of your work. Despite this site showing 10,000 sheep being crazy, it's really cool. I mean seriously who doesn't want to look at 10,000 different sheep?!

Also Aaron Koblin gives us some cool statistics like the average time spent on each sheep (105 seconds) And then you can buy a plate of the sheep for 20 dollars (the sheep are lickable adhesive stamps).

Though most of these sheep are crapfully drawn (he gave us a pen, no eraser and 2 cents. Not much to work with considering all Turkers are lazy, don't deny it!)

So ya be sure to check it out, and then go come up with your own crazy idea. The only thing left to ask is, Aaron is your house covered in sheep stuff? What's with the sheep obsession? Why not horses or something? Is this a personal thing?! Ok enough of that.

Requester Site Overhaul

2006-04-27T21:36:00.000-07:00

Wow....I didn't see this one coming at all. Amazon has totally changed the Requester site.

The biggest difference is HIT Creation, in other words a user can create there own HITs, Which eliminates the need for sites like HIT Builder (although it has some nifty features like graphs) and even things like CastingWords, rather could just go straight to the source of the labor. But of course just using CastingWords would be simpler and easier.

Other then just HIT Creation, the site has HIT Management, and much better reporting. The features are far too many for me to list. So just go and check it out.

HIT: Are these Books Different?

2006-04-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

A new HIT type that I just spotted from Amazon asks "Are these Books different?" I wasn't able to grab the HIT but I'm assuming you simply compare to books from there cover, given title, a description and see if they are the same. The HIT paid 2 cents...And seemed to be in short supply, so I wouldn't count on seeing many of these around.

mTurk Interface Changes

2006-04-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

Today mTurk received some updates to it's top bar, going to a bluish color and you can now search for HITs by price. Nothing major, but a nice little update.

Spellcheck.

2006-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

Can you spell? Hopefully....I'm not a skilled spelling, spellcheck is my hero, without it I'd spend many hours with my nose stuck in a dictionary hopelessly lost. But am I alone in my lack of spelling skill? No. Here's a search for "Mechnical Turk" (notice that there should be an "a" in mechanical).

Here's a few of my favorites

Craig of AWS on the mTurk Developer forums.
Me (No I'm not going to correct that, it would kill my point)
The mTurk Developer homepage designer (Note this misspelling disappeared after I popped off an email telling them about it)
Countless bloggers have made the mistake.
Even people who don't speak English mess it up.

My point is simply a friendly reminder, to always click spellcheck before you click publish.

Great Answers!

2006-04-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

Finally people have a reason to do the 2 and 3 cent Amazon Research question HIT's. They've started up a "Great Answers!" Weekly contest for them. Here's the description:

Every week we will pay a cash reward to the top 10 workers who have received the most number of "Great Answer" votes from answering Amazon Requester Inc.'s Research Question HITs.

* To get a "Great Answer" vote you must work on Amazon Requester Inc.'s Research Question HITs and provide high quality answers.
* Each question you answer can receive a "Great Answer" vote from the person who asked the question.
* Each time you receive a "Great Answer" vote we will notify you via email, which will also include your "Great Answer" stats for the week and how well you are doing relative to your peers.
* At the end of the week we will reward the top 10 workers who have received the most number of "Great Answer" votes.
* The top 10 workers will then receive an email with a token ID which you will need to enter into the appropriate HIT to claim your cash reward.

Weekly Rewards ending Apr 13 2006:

#1 ranked worker - $50

#2 ranked worker - $45

#3 ranked worker - $40

#4 ranked worker - $35

#5 ranked worker - $30

#6 ranked worker - $25

#7 ranked worker - $20

#8 ranked worker - $15

#9 ranked worker - $10

#10 ranked worker - $5

So what Amazon is doing here, is putting up 10 HIT's, that are only relevant to 10 people. I'm going to call this HIT pollution.

Now don't get me wrong, this is a great way to motivate Turkers to do higher quality work on the Research Questions. But here's what they should do, first raise the price of research questions to something reasonable. I consider myself a very skilled searcher, I can find all sorts of things that others fail at, but unless someone is asking "What is the capital of Japan?" I need time to research, and so does everyone else unless they are rather knowledgeable in the field of the question.

And Amazon knows as well as I do, that if you don't pay well on HIT's, you get junk back. Turkers won't work for 10 cents an hour, we aren't starving on the streets, we have some free time and are chillin on the computer. Now if mTurk contacted local libraries, they might be able to setup a Turking for the Homeless program, where homeless people could go to local libraries and try to get back on there feet via Turking. But I don't see this catching on at the moment.

Now if you want to put in a good work rewards system, and can't wait for the mTurk development team to implement it, use something like Amazon Gift Certificates. Then the money stays in the Amazon system and we don't annoy Turkers with irrelevant HIT's.

mTurk to Exit Beta in the Next 2 Months

2006-04-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

An article on Amazon's LinuxWorld Presentation says that they plan on having mTurk exit beta in the next 2 months. Personally as a requester and as a Turker I'd like to see a number of new features added still. Of course this can happen after mTurk exits beta. But within the next 5 months I'd like to see:

The elimination of the need for token's, create a system where users could perform all of any HIT without visiting any other website (at the requesters choice) It'd be nice to be able to upload files, images, work with pdf's, and flash in the mTurk window. The token system is bothersome, and has room for mistakes.
I'd like to see a Worker ID program, basically a worker if they choose can allow there name and perhaps a profile to go with their number. Perhaps give requesters the option of inviting workers to do certain HIT's (Have an invite be like a qualification). This would further the idea that Turkers are simply small task oriented contractors.
Personalized listing of HIT's (not needed now, but if mTurk ever fills up with HIT's, it would be useful to have a sorting that puts HIT's similar to those a worker has completed in the past on top)
Qualification deaths (there are so many stupid qualifications that haven't been used for anything for quite a while, it's bothersome, and a lot like litter)

And I'm sure the folks that work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week have many more great ideas. Many of which I hope to see in the months to come, good luck Turk Developers, Rudy and everybody else that works on the Turk project.

Google Plans to use mTurk to Improve Google Earth

2006-04-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

This morning Google announced plans to use mTurk to acquire pictures of everything from ground level to add to it's Google Earth product which currently has satellite pictures of everywhere on earth. This is quite similar to the Blockview project by Amazon, only rather then using us Turkers to correct the images, Google will simply have us take them. Although exactly how much Google will pay for each picture is still up in the air, it's rumored to be 3 cents. So in order to get that Xbox 360 you've been dreaming of, you need to take 13,333 pictures or so. And you have to know the GPS coordinates of each one, and make sure that no one beats you to the punch. I suggest taking your camera up to a rural region but you should probably wait to get started until these HIT's appear, so that you know the exact instructions from Google, my guess is that they will release some sort of program that will assist you by offering you certain GPS locations near you, and then uploading the pictures for you.

Anyways, I am very excited, finally the old early beta days where you could sit for 8 hours a day doing HIT's will be back. I can't wait.

Edit: Just in case you didn't notice, Happy April Fools

HIT: SingASound

2006-03-28T18:18:00.000-08:00

I'm lost. SingASound has one HIT up in which it has you go here, there you try to imitate a tone. Which basically makes me think either they are developing a brilliant midi to human sound converter (which would be so weird...But cool) Or have go insane. Seriously....What is this for?

OK, my bewilderment aside. The HIT paid 2 cents for 8 second of work (you have to make the tone noise for 8 seconds). As well the site asks for your Turker ID, something that I know of no easy way to acquire. Luckily I have mine from when Casting Words emailed them out, so I was able to complete this HIT.

Anyways, I'll be keeping an eye on the SingASound folk and I'll be picking my brain trying to figure out if they are brilliant or just crazy.

Interviews!

2006-03-16T16:33:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to interview people on mTurk for quite a while and today I finally got around to writing up some questions. So if you're an mTurk developer (like CastingWords, Von Kemplen, HIT Builder, or those Amazon workers who work on mTurk itself or one of those other guys) or even if you're just an active Turker who has been around for quite a while (Since November) I'd like to setup an interview with you during the next few weeks. Please email me, and we can set one up.

Is Turking.com Dead?

2006-03-13T13:59:00.000-08:00

Turking.com has been down for 4 days. Previously it's been down for one or so but never this long, as well the front page has seemed pretty much abandoned for some time. So it seems there's only one Turker dedicated forum now. Which is kind of sad, now granted I never was very fond of Turking.com, it sprang out of an overgrown thread at SomethingAwful.com, which although the guys over there are entertaining as heck, most admit that they are jerks, thus the name "Something Awful".

Overall the Turk community is still in a slow decline since the early beta days when 100s of thousands flocked to mTurk to check out how they can make money while sitting at home on their computer. Part of the problem is the slow development of sites and services that use mTurk, although many sites/services are being built, the only current service that I regurlarly see HIT's from is CastingWords, other common HIT's are from Amazon or companies using mTurk to process there data such as Enrovia Research.

But I see many success services and sites popping up over the next 6 months, and perhaps the community will begin to thrive once again.

HowTo: Cheat at Take a Photo HIT's

2006-03-12T16:44:00.000-08:00

A new "Take a Photo" HIT has shown up, this ones pays $45 dollars for taking 18 photos in Lake Tapps, WA. The requested photos are of street view, and a view of the front of the house of 9 different houses, exactly what they want is made very clear in samples provided.

Now how does someone cheat at this? Submit photos of different houses with numbers changed via photoshop? Take pictures of houses with no addresses on them? No.

Quite simply you go online and find a house or two for sale in the area of the pictures requested. You then call up the realtor and tell them that you will pay them 30 dollars or so to take the requested pictures for you (don't mention anything about mTurk, make up some story as to why you want them). If the realtor wants more pay, simply call another in the area. Now I'm not sure if this would work...But there's some other options, like finding someone on a social network or chat room that lives in the city and making an arrangement to pay them enough to make it worth their time, and not letting them realize that you are actually making money out of it.

You would essentially be contracting out work that has been contracted to you, cheating yes, but I don't think the requester (DSK Consulting) would mind. Maybe my idea is brilliant or maybe it's retarded...I haven't tried it yet, but I might eventually...If anyone does try it be sure to email me, or post on a forum on the experience.

Using mTurk to Find Common Errors

2006-03-09T18:06:00.000-08:00

Steve Tse has put up a few typing HIT's which have a really unique idea to them. They simply ask a Turker to type the same word thirty times, not correcting any errors typing or spelling mistakes. This could be used for finding domains to register for spelling/typing mistakes, creating redirection directories, finding cheap AdSense ads for misspelled searches and tons of other stuff that AI can't quite figure out how we manage to mess up in the way we do.

Now here's the issue, at least 97% of Turkers are good people who are just trying to make some extra cash during their free times, but there are a few bad apples. A script could pretty easily be written making a person only have to type the word once, and then it just copies it. Or there's good old copy and paste. So how does one keep Turkers from cheating? Shoot all that you catch cheating with a rifle, but illegal scare tactics tend to be troublesome. What one could do is use some sort of JavaScript to keep boxes from being pasted into, but I'm sure a GreaseMonkey script could get around that. So the real solution is um...I'll get back to you on that one.

Amazon at eTech 06

2006-03-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

Amazon's Luis Felipe Cabrera's speech at eTech 06 on mTurk hasn't brought any new information on the future of mTurk to the table but the news article is an interesting read on the theoretical application of mTurk. Of course mTurk has yet to live up to the vision the Amazon has for it (Thousands of simple tasks that are easily done by humans but difficult for machines), but it's still young in life. Well see how it evolves in the next 6 months.

mTurk API Updated

2006-03-06T17:14:00.000-08:00

Amazon has updated the mTurk API, though the changes seem to be mostly minor.

From Amazon Developer Forums

HIT Types. You can now define HIT types to manage work that takes the form of many similar HITs. A HIT type is simply a set of values for HIT properties that are common to all HITs of a particular type. You can now use a HIT type ID to create HITs with the property values of a HIT type, and to query for HITs of a given type.
"Reviewing" HITs. When a HIT becomes "reviewable," such as when results have been submitted for all of the HIT's assignments or the HIT has reached its expiration time, your application can now move the HIT to a new status, called "reviewing." Your application can query for "reviewable" HITs and "reviewing" HITs separately, giving your application greater flexibility in how it reviews HITs.
Updatable Qualification tests. You can now change the Qualification test for a Qualification type at any time using the UpdateQualificationType operation.
New Qualification request fields. A request for a Qualification now includes the ID of the user who is requesting the Qualification. The request also includes the test question data that corresponds to the user's answer data. If you change the test for a type, you can keep track of which version of the test a user took by looking at the request data.

The Doings of Amazon

2006-03-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

A recent HIT to surface from Amazon is another contest type. But rather then another logo contest, this HIT pays 2 cents and simply asks for some comments on peoples troubles with writing and reading blogs for a new Amazon product.

As well a new handy feature has shown up on mTurk. Now whenever you are not qualified to do an HIT, there is a "Why?" link, which when clicked will explain to you what you need to do to get qualified. Which is handy and dandy...Ok so that was lame. But I'm still Smiling!

HIT: Categories

2006-03-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

Dennis Connolly has created a few HIT's with an interesting but good idea. He asks the Turker to think of a category that the information given fits into. Often times organizing just right can be a pain, so why not send it out to the masses. Expanding on this idea, mTurk could be used by social bookmarkers who are too lazy to properly catorgize the sites they submit. And in many others ways to create order on sites. And it could even be applied to organizing peoples and businesses non-net related lives.

Just Call n Ask!

2006-03-02T22:04:00.000-08:00

Call n Ask appears to be a new mTurk powered service still in early development. The basic idea is when you are out on the street and have a question, just call them up and your question is researched and found on the web.

The site itself doesn't mention mTurk, but a couple of test HIT's have been spotted. So putting two and two together, they plan on recording the questions and then sending them to mTurk for Turkers to complete. Now this isn't a new type of service to mTurk, Crikey Guru is the same idea, but this is a whole new way to send the question.

Personally I don't have a cell phone, but such a service as this would be really great, perhaps pay a modest fee per a month and you the you could call up anytime and ask a question. Then get a vocal response minutes later. Curiosity and sometimes the need to know this and that happens all the time. Of course payment could be tricky, but I trust that they will iron out all the bumps.

Visit a Site HITs

2006-02-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

Visit a Site HITs have been floating around for a while, and today I got a chance to do a little investigating on them. To be plain, these appear to be click-fraud, using mTurk to get users to click ads. When the ads are clicked the advertiser pays them so much for each click. Here's the HIT I am going to break down.

It takes you here, where it wants you to click on one of two redirection URLs. Which are redirected by an Advertising agency, whose affiliate program's TOS states

".12. You agree not to artificially inflate the number of clicks, impressions or other activity, nor to permit others to do so"

Using mTurk to inflate the numbers is clearly a violation. Now all of the questions in the HIT simply allow the scammer to figure out what pays the most, and whether you actually clicked on the ad or not (the IP request).

Now on mTurk's side, it doesn't appear to be a violation of the TOS. But obviously advertisers don't pay people to pay others to pointlessly click on their ads, they pay you when people who are interested in the product click on their ad, not when you pay people to click on them.

So here's basically what Phillip Tattum has setup, a Turker clicks on ads on his website, the advertising agency pays him so much for every time an ad is clicked, he then pays the Turker 5 cents of this. So the Turker profits, Phillip profits, and the company that paid for advertising gets scammed. Not Good. I've forwarded this to Web Gains so they can take a look.

Mechnical Turk Utilities

2006-02-26T22:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how long this has been around, but I though I'd pass it along. From Erica Sadun, it's a page of mTurk Utilities, which allow you to do basically everything a requestor would want to do, similar to HIT Builder, only not wrapped up into a product.

I'm currently sick, and haven't gotten my head clear enough to check it out well, but it sure looks like a handy tool.

Finding Queries with mTurk

2006-02-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

These HIT's seem interesting..Though time consuming if you want to return good results for the one cent. Here's the instructions

Find good queries for a URL.

Query Finding Guidelines

I want three queries that characterize
the given URL. One query per text-box, please.

Queries should be such that if someone were to search on it, the URL in question would be a reasonable result.
Queries should be at least two words long.
Let's review. QUERIES MUST BE AT LEAST TWO WORDS LONG. How many words does a query have to have? At least two. Two or more shall be the number of words in the query, and the number of words in the query shall be two or more.
The query shouldn't be too generic. "Money", "Success" and "health" are BAD queries, because they are too generic. The queries should be SPECIFIC to the given URL.

So what I get from this is that they are trying to find keywords to target on search engines...By using potential users. Which is a great idea, but paying 1 cent isn't going to get them much more then what's on the top of people's heads. I'd say up it to 5 cents and they will get a lot better results. Oh and for those who are curious here is a sample url from the HIT's . Overrall this is an interesting idea...but appears like it will need some tweaking.

New HIT: PC Game Review

2006-02-11T21:36:00.000-08:00

I assume this is a test from Tony Austin, because I am certainty not going to write a PC Game Review for 1 cent, that has to be at least 500 words long.

On the idea of using mTurk to write reviews for a website, it would only really work for already released games, for newer ones you'd want to have the review out before the release of the game, thus you need to actually have a reputable name reviewing the games so that you can get your hands on them early. But still an interesting idea.

New HIT: Community Created Content

2006-02-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

A new HIT from Vinay P Vaidya, what's you to create some content for this site, http://www.sitesamachar.com, in exchange for a dollar. I would try it out but alas I know nothing of Bangalore City. Here's the instruction from the HIT:

"http://www.sitesamachar.com is an attempt to build
community generated content for Bangalore City. You can create
community listings for Tourist attractions, Restaurants, Neighborhoods
and Blogs. All you have to do is go to
http://www.sitesamachar.com/cgi-bin/create_listing.cgi?type=T and
create listings. After you create 5 listings, specify the names
of the listings in the following text box. If your listings are
considered as valuable by the www.sitesamachar.com review board, you
will be paid $1. What are you waiting for, share your knowledge,
opinions and impressions of bangalore with others and earn money !!"

Sounds kind of fun...If you actually knew the city...Researching online might work but doubtful you'd easily find anything not already on there.

Image Den

2006-02-08T01:04:00.000-08:00

Image Den is a service that a few things have been flying around about. I've avoided it...Because it's mine.

Image Den is my hobbyist venture into being an mTurk requester. I will do my best to not self-promote here, or allow it to affect my writing at all.

So what is Image Den? Quite simply it's the answer to all of anyone's image needs....In theory. In reality, I am building a photo retouching service, and if that gets going good I will add on. A lot of the building of this site has been done by Turkers, because I like to outsource my work. (Especially scripting...I hate syntax) So look forward to seeing some of these, and kick me a couple times telling me to hurry up and get finished building it.

First vk Translator HITs Up

2006-02-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

This morning there were a few vk Translator Spanish to English HITs from Von Klempen. They seem to pay decent, I wouldn't know since I'm not fluent in two languages. But for the amount of text that was there, if I simply retyped it, it would go pretty quick for the 1 dollar that the HITs were paying. So if you have one of the vk Translator Qualifications, keep your eyes peeled for more of these. And if you don't and speak two pretty standard languages, go look around in the qualifications for the right test to take.

Adsense Powered by mTurk from Amazon

2006-02-06T18:41:00.000-08:00

Rumors are floating around, that Amazon plans on launching an ad network that would rival Google's Adsense. So where does mTurk come in? Adsense claims to check over ads for TOS compliance and approriateness in general. mTurk would be a much cheaper solution to this then salaried employees. As well Amazon could offer a service in which mTurkers would write the ads for clients. Simply provide a link to your website, choose the ad type, and mTurkers design your ad for you. You approve it and bang, minimal effort, high quality, cheap advertising. Heh. Someone needs to create a "Powered by mTurk" logo, for websites to proudly display.

In short, I hope this is more then just a rumor, for more mTurk work (possibly) and an end to Google's dominance of web advertising (which scares me because Adsense is everywhere).

Crikey Guru Launched!

2006-02-06T13:44:00.000-08:00

Crikey Guru's Beta started today. What is it? A simple way to make HIT's from the Casting Words Crew.

Here's the official description:

Ask your question, set your price. We have thousands of people ready to answer your question, do your task. Get one answer or get a thousand. Harness the wisdom of the crowd. Conduct a poll. Get someone to take a picture of the house you grew up in. Ask for people's opinions on anything and everything. The sky's the limit!

Right now it only supports simple instructions and then a text box for the answer to be returned via. Then you enter your email, and they send you the results. Pretty sweet, for more answers to your curiosity check out the FAQ.

Edit: I got my answer. Bob Kane created Batman...I should've thought of something harder.

HIT: Lookup Folio Number

2006-02-02T21:50:00.000-08:00

A new HIT in testing from Enrovia Research has the user go here. And look for the Lot described by some data. Here's the description from the one I got

LOT 33, BLOCK 5, OF LESLIE PATIO HOMES, SECTION THREE, ACCORDING TO THE PLAT THEREOF AS RECORDED IN PLAT BOOK 136 AT PAGE 59 OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS OF DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA. PARCEL ID#: 34 1133 027 0650. A/K/A 20342 NORTHWEST 36TH AVENUE, OPA LOCKA, FL 33056

Eww. That's kind of nasty. I was unsuccessful in finding the Folio Number...But I didn't try very hard.

mTurk Down

2006-02-02T09:20:00.000-08:00

This is the first time mTurk has been down for maintenance in a long time. What does this mean? I'm betting updates! Sweet. Perhaps now the error page, horrible math, and broken HIT's will disappear. Or maybe that's my wishful thinking.

mTurk File Storage?

2006-02-01T23:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what this is, maybe someone can enlighten me. But two podcasts are up that have http://storage.amazonaws.com/ in the url for the podcast. Neither have any relation to Amazon. So can requestors now upload files to mTurk for users to view/download directly?

And if so is it a good idea considering the effects on your bandwidth? Or could you bypass your server and have the user upload it directly to mTurk's server?

Usually I try to provide answers here and not questions...But this just seems odd. I don't see any updates on the documentation or anything on it. Perhaps a new feature in testing?

Tidbits

2006-01-30T13:48:00.000-08:00

Nothing important has happened lately on mTurk. There's been new qualifications of all sorts, some perhaps paving the way for new products that take advantage of mTurk. But most are just people experimenting.

I myself have been experimenting a little bit lately, I'm planning on launching an mTurk powered service for the experience and perhaps some profit...So keep your eyes peeled for that. (But I'm lazy so it probably won't happen for a month or two...heh)

Also I've been avoiding my homework lately...So it might show up on mTurk...Do it well so I get a good grade. Thanks.

Tutorial: Using HIT Builder to Make an HIT

2006-01-24T10:55:00.000-08:00

HIT Builder is ready to be used by you. For fun, profit, and freedom from busy work.

Here's how.

Visit the mTurk Requester Site, register using the same email as you use with mTurk. (So that any money that you have in that account, can be used to pay people)
If you don't have any money in your Amazon Account, go to "Your Account" then click "Transfer money to your Amazon account". Follow It's Instruction.
Create an AWS account, after confirming it log in using the provided link in the confirmation email to get your Secret ID and Access KeyID.
Create an HIT-Builder Account
Login to HIT Builder in IE, or in the IE Tab Extension for Firefox.
Click on the "First time building a HIT? -- Click here to try our Wizard Interface" link.
The wizard is very helpful, there's no need for any instruction but to read what it tells you.
After posting, watch mTurk for your HIT(s) to show up. Then wait an excitement for them to be returned.

I sort of just threw this together, I will revise it later. In the meantime, if you need any help with posting HIT's to mTurk using HIT Builder please email me cracell AT gmail DOT com, or IM me aim:Crancell, Msn: cracell AT gmail DOT com. And this will tell me what I need to make clearer in the tutorial.

As well you can get support from HIT-Builder here.

Sorry About my Experiment

2006-01-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

I'd like to say sorry about my little experiment (see previous post). I was testing the mTurk system and got a little carried away with my idea. And unfortunately, I can't get the darn HIT to delete. But it will expire soon anyway.

On the results, first off the experiment was a failure, although mTurk could be used in this way, there aren't nearly enough active users on it for such a thing to work, unless the price was bumped up, costing the requester actual money.

Secondly, Turkers please think before blinding following instructions, email me the screenshot? How on earth could I match a Turker with an email, and it would be pointless with so many. The only point in asking for a screenshot, is to make people think I was going to actually check. While in reality every single person will be approved. In general it was a bad idea, one that I should've thought out when it wasn't late at night. But I got rather excited about whether it would work or not. Such HIT's in general are wrong, and against the mTurk TOS. Mine could be justified by being called an experiment, but still it was a bad way to test to see if my idea would work. I apologize to the digg community who hardly noticed it, and to the mTurk community that may have a lesser view of me now. I promise the future test HIT's of mine will be much more responsible.

In short, I let my curiosity loose and abandoned logic somewhere on the road. I will not let it happen again.

Experiment: Can mTurk Defeat the Digg System?

2006-01-20T21:11:00.000-08:00

First off here is what Digg is according to Digg.com "...With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

So here is my experiment, I will post a HIT on mTurk for 400 users to do one time. In which they will digg my story on digg.com of this blog post, then email me a screenshot of this story dugg. To show that they dugg it.

In theory this will defeat the digg system of users promoting stories to the front page rather then moderators, without the use of bots or scripts. Simply for 4 bucks.

To Diggers: Please don't kill me, this is an experiment. If it works and catches on and I create some sort of monster....Sorry. But that won't happen. This is simply the testing of an idea, if successful then hopefully digg will be modified to make sure the system can't be abused in such a way. Also please note, I have no ads on this blog, I have little to gain but knowledge. Besides soon after hitting the homepage, moderators will remove the story if this experiment is sucessful.

Von Kempelen enters the Stage

2006-01-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

A company called "Von Kempelen" has come out with 3 services powered by mTurk.

1st off we have vk Voice, a text to speech service. Basically they get text via RSS feed, email, web forms etc. And then send it off to us Turkers to record.

2nd we have vk Translator, workers simple translate text from whatever language to whatever language specified.

3rd we have vk Custom, which they state they will help plug your business into mTurk. I assume writing any programs and such the business may need for it.

Right now to start off you have to email them. I haven't seen any HIT's from them and qualifications from them are labeled as the company "Santa Cruz Tech" (the makers of Von Kempelen). So ya we will see how this works out. I can't wait till I can do some text to speech work, sounds fun.

New HIT - Mortgage Lookup

2006-01-14T22:37:00.000-08:00

Mortgage Lookup HIT's have shown up. In sort they are very similar to the transfer tax HIT's. These come from Enrovia Research. Which I think is another name for "Matthew Haines" (as in the company he owns/works for or something). Anyways, these look rather long and boring for 1 cent. But money is money, that's why we are Turkers.

HIT Builder is Buggy

2006-01-13T11:00:00.000-08:00

Last night I spent 30+ minutes messing around with HIT Builder. What I ran into were tons of errors, data not being saved when it said it was, pages not formatting correctly (buttons that should be visible were off page) etc. So I decided to switch to IE. Less problems but still this and that. Once I finally got an HIT together I tried to post and there was an error. Though this could've been an error on Amazon's side. But I have yet to see anyone post HIT's from HIT Builder, so my bet is everyone is having the same issues as me.

In short, HIT Builder is going to be awesome, but has a few things to work out right now. Like firefox compatibility. Thus I'm going to assume that it's an early beta. That truthfully they should've been doing internally and waited longer before making it public, but oh well.

HIT Builder - No Programming/Scripting Needed!

2006-01-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

DPA Software, a new player to the mTurk scene has launched a site called "HIT Builder". It's a very slick and pretty simple tool to create your own HIT's. I played with the options and it all seemed pretty nice. Maybe I'll ask someone to write me a story or something later today.

The ability to make your own qualifications is coming soon but not implemented yet. The service is currently free, but their FAQ says that may change once HIT Builder leaves Beta. It's got tons of "Getting Started" tidbits everywhere and it all around seems like a great product considering it just launched. I'm looking forward to seeing HIT's coming from people using it.

If your interested make sure you go get a requestors account and put some money in your Amazon account.

Edit: I had a little bit of difficulty figuring out where to find my Secret ID and AccessKeyID. So here's where to go to get yours. You signup for an AWS account there, then they email you and there's a link in the email.

Pheromone Trail Advertising

2006-01-12T10:32:00.000-08:00

A new type of HIT called "PheromoneTrail.com Instrumentation" from Amazon pays you one dollar to put one of their badges on your site. Personally 1 dollar isn't enough to justify polluting this blog. Though I wonder what's to keep people from quickly making a site or blog and doing this to it. Heck it says "You may perform this HIT for as many websites as you like." I have probably 100 or so abandoned websites. It would be a bit of a pain butwould be well worth 100 dollars. Of course almost all of these have no traffic and suck. So ya, the modules themselves show where people come to the site from and where they go to. So interesting, but no thanks.

Little of This, Little of That

2006-01-11T13:28:00.000-08:00

The qualifications page has been updated to have a "Pending Qualifications" page. As well a few oddball HIT's have popped up, like "Draw a Picture" from Aaron. I haven't been able to view one, but sounds interesting.

Lately we've had Research Questions (some for paying 20 cents), Rank Your Top 3, and Data Extraction HIT's. That's about it, no real news. I've seen several miscellaneous test HIT's, which I'm guessing are signs that we may soon have many HIT's from some new requesters. As well there have been a few podcast HIT's but not many. And as far as scripts/helper programs, nothing of much significance has shown up.

Get Paid to Take Photos!

2006-01-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

Matthew Haines has posted up a new test HIT entitled "Take photos of properties in 10027.". Inside it says

Coming Soon! $2 per HIT!

For the address below, please take three photos. The first photo should be a direct shot of the building in which the top, bottom, left, and right side of the building are all visible and about 10% in from the edge of the photo. The second shot should be a closeup clearly showing the street number of the property. The third photo should be a shot of the street signs at the nearest intersection showing the name of the street and the name of the intersecting street.

Set your camera's resolution so that the longer edge of the pictures is between 900 and 1200 pixels across. If there are trees, cars, or other obstructions blocking the house or building from clear view, move side to side on the sidewalk to get the clearest view possible. Choose the time of day according to where the sun will be so that you get good exposure. Overly dark pictures will be rejected.

After you take the pictures, upload them to http://dev2.psrk.com:8080/upload.html. Each time you upload a photo the server will give you a token. (A token is a 12-20 character identifier for the picture.) Put that token in the appropriate text input box below.

For anyone in New York the given address is "205 West 123rd Street, New York, NY 10027" (but this is a test HIT paying 0 cents)

Now 2 dollars isn't half bad, if you live a couple streets over. And despite my personal estimates (I could be totally off) of their being 6,000 active turkers. I doubt many photos will be taken. If I ever see one for my town, I will defiantly go across town rather pointlessly to take pictures. Just because it'd be fun to do once or twice. But I can't see this taking off. Though I am rather curious as to what exactly these HIT's are for.

A9 Is Back!

2006-01-05T20:16:00.000-08:00

Just a followup to the new A9 Qualifications, here's the info on these new HIT's

A9.com Yellow Pages : Business URL Matching

Please visit the web address provided and determine if it is a highly relevant website for the business specified in the HIT. You should answer "Yes" if: * The website is the primary website for the business in question, even if the address isn't a perfect match. * The website is a subset of the broader business listed (e.g. if the website is that of a teacher's, but the business listed is the school's name.) * The website is a superset of the business listed (e.g. if the website is for the corporate parent but the business listed is for an individual franchise.)

Can I say sweet? Ok so maybe they won't put too many of these HIT's out. But let's say they put every single business name matched website, on there for 2 or 1 cent. Awesome. My bandwidth is going to die. But tons of work to do. And easy fast work at that. I'm so drooling.

Qualifications Attack!

2006-01-05T19:58:00.000-08:00

Wow, I just peeked at the Qualifications and it's crazy. Two automatic (you just ask for them and you get them) Qualifications from A9 yellow pages. A New Power Podcaster Qualification (also a ask and receive) And that's it.

Just a reminder, the reasoning behind Qualifications, that don't require you to do anything but ask for them (to get them) is that rather then saying you can't do their HIT's based on your total rejection rate. They can use just the rate you have with their HIT's.

I am quite interested as to what we will be doing with A9 Yellow Pages, I'm not really sure. Technically, Block View Image Adjustments have to do with the Yellow Pages, but I don't think they are coming back.

Santa Cruz Tech Starts Testing

2006-01-04T23:02:00.000-08:00

Santa Cruz Tech, the company behind such websites as BlogShares. Has got a test qualification up. Here's the description

"Authorized users will receive a code to use in this qualification, so they can complete our test HITs."

I'm not sure if this means general turkers will have a chance to apply to do their HIT's in general, or their test HIT's. Or maybe their own employees (like the guys at Turk Watch) will be able to do them. I have yet to see any information on what Santa Cruz Tech's HIT's are going to be, I assume at first it will be something to do with their current sites, then eventually perhaps a whole new site, like what happened with CastingWords. But who knows, till we start to them popping up.

Edit: I just want to bring light to the comment left by the owner of the qualification

The qualification is so I can put up test HITs without 'the world' performing them, for a couple of reasons I cannot disclose at this time. :)

Once testing is complete and we're ready to go (as little as a few days, could be a bit longer though), while we may require other qualifications, they will be available 'to all'.

I hate it when people have secrets...I feel so left out. Heh.

Acris HIT's are coming, I can feel them.

2006-01-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

Matthew Haines (the creator of ACRIS HIT's) has put up a qualification for ACRIS HIT's, my assumption is this is going to be a growing trend of using Qualifications as a checkpoint to make sure people aren't totally stupid. As well I think they should be used as tutorials because that would make things simpler for us workers but oh well.

And a Happy New Year to Everyone!

French Translation (BTTS) Officially Dead,

2005-12-30T14:55:00.000-08:00

Too bad this never really took off. But it's been shutdown. Though on a bright note the source code to it has been released.

Amazon is Setting a Bad Example

2005-12-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

This morning I have seen several of the Product Question HIT's. Which ask a question like "Where is the best place to change your oil in New York?". Or 'What is the best 5mp digital camera for your money?" Things like that, these are obviously tests of a system, perhaps signs of a future feature on Amazon where users could ask a product questions in human form, and then Turkers could answer it for them. But tests cost money, these HIT's pay 2 cents. Amazon should be able to put up more then 2 cents per an HIT for development. These HIT's should pay 50 cents or more and I expect they will. But I think Amazon should be a good example and actually pay Turkers for the test HIT's. As well you are going to get different results based on what you pay. If you pay a worker 1 cent to research processors, they are going to give you a quick bit. But if you pay them 3 dollars. You can count on them really doing there homework for 30 minutes or so. So testing with low payments doesn't necessary show you the results that you will get at higher prices.

I Just Realized Something

2005-12-28T01:16:00.000-08:00

Tonight while doing "Survey Verification" HIT's (there were about 15 thousand of them) I had my scripts turned off and was using mTurk's "Automatically accept the next HIT" feature. I found this to be a nice alternative to GreaseMonkey scripts, but then I realized that it's far superior because with it you don't get the "This HIT has already been Accepted" message.Ever. Because it's assigning you one, not showing you one.

Just felt like pointing that out. It rocks, one less annoyance in mTurk, and a reason to take auto-accept out of scripts and just use mTurk's. Also this is a smart move by Amazon because for those usually auto-accept scripts it just wastes there bandwidth and ties up the server. And old move, but I didn't realize what it had really changed until I finally had a massive amount of HIT's to use it on.

Review HIT's

2005-12-27T21:37:00.000-08:00

These look like a pain for 3 cents. Here's a full rundown on them, basically you receive a question like "What is the best 5mp Digital Camera for your money?" (the requester is Amazon). You research it via local stores (calling them), and the internet, then return a review. Although I see this being rather fun, and useful for Amazon. 3 cents is a ripoff. Of course most likely if we see more of these the price will go up. These were more then likely just tests. So we'll see.

Rank Your Top 3 Verification HIT

2005-12-27T21:01:00.000-08:00

I snagged on of these. They are simple quick and easy. And pay 1 cent. You are presented with 3 answers, from the results of a Rank Your Top 3 HIT, you simply mark for each one if it is a valid answer or not. (For instance if the subject was "Best Pizza Places in Chicago" and the answers were Eat, More, and Hi. That would be a no.)

Merry Christmas Turkers!

2005-12-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

Rank your Top 3 Qualification

2005-12-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure when this showed up, but a new qualification called "Rank your Top 3" Verifier has shown up. The description is as follows.

This qualification allows you to be a verifier for "Rank Your Top 3" HITs. Your task will be to ensure that submissions are accurate. Your ability to continue as a verifier for these HITs depends on you consistently submitting high quality work. If your work quality does not remain high, your qualification score will be reduced and you may no longer be eligible to be a verifier.

Oddly enough, when I took the test, there is only one question, in which it tells you to check mark a box and then click submit and then you're done. I passed with 100 percent, I suppose this is anti-idiot protection or something. Or perhaps a test of the qualification system.

Apparel Color Normalization HIT

2005-12-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

Spimal has spotted a new type of HIT titled "Apparel Color Normalization" from Amazon. You simply match a color with the fabric shown. And it pays 2 cents. Sounds pretty sweet. Though few have shown up so far maybe this is the next big HIT (Image Adjustments, then Confirm Artist names, then this) As well podcasts have been appearing every night lately.

Another use for mTurk

2005-12-22T20:57:00.000-08:00

As I was wondering the net, I stumbled upon a blog post in which the writer plans on using mTurk to correct the page numbers on books on his site.

"I know that some of the page numbers of D&D books are wrong. I'll eventually get around to fixing that in Mechanical Turk."

Although mTurk has already been used for the extraction of data from images (Acris). It hasn't been used for retrieving page number data. This could be a very quick and unstressful sort of HIT. I'm also looking forward to the first HIT's where, unlike podcast transcribing, you type out the text on images (or tag them). Though with the writings being paragraphs and such, not a few numbers like Acris HIT's. I know many companies have been digitizing there records to stay up in this digital age so I wouldn't be surpised to see such HIT's.

Updated Developer Guide

2005-12-22T12:58:00.000-08:00

I am not all that familar with the developer guide, so I don't know what has changed. But Amazon just released an updated version of the mTurk Developer Guide.

AWS Casting Words Walkthrough

2005-12-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

Jeff Bar has posted a nice look at CastingWords.com over at the Amazon Web Services Blog. Casting Words is one of the first services that has been born as a middle man that takes you work and has Turker's do it. And considering the hundred's of podcast HIT's I saw last night, it is becoming sucessful.

Automatically Accept HIT's without a Script

2005-12-21T22:03:00.000-08:00

Amazon has added an automatically accept HIT checkbox which appears under submit when you accept an HIT. In other news....Tons of podcast HIT's.

To Beard or Not to Beard

2005-12-20T18:26:00.000-08:00

A humerous test by Michael M. George (an amazon employee) has shown up asking whether you think he looks better with a beard of without. The survey pays 1 cent and it appears that everyone can take it once.

Turk Tidbits

2005-12-19T23:49:00.000-08:00

A new requester of HIT's has been spotted (Santa Cruz Tech).

As well castingwords.com has put up a resource pag e for turkers doing it's work. Pretty nice little page they put up. I really need to get an HIT of theirs so I can pass the qualification test.

Edit: I was poking around Santa Cruz Tech, turns out it's the company that employs the guys at Turk Watch. (The three of them work on Santa Cruz Tech's Blogshares Project. The company builds websites basically, though perhaps they plan on taking advantage of mTurk to reel in some dough some other way.

Rate your Top 3

2005-12-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

A plethora of these HIT's from Amazon have shown up. Basically your task is to identify the best of various categories, all of the city ones (only appearing for major cities) the catogory is establishments. And the other one that doesn't name a city tends to be rather random.

Basically this is another survey type of HIT, my guess is Amazon has decided this would be a cool thing to offer (a site with tons of survey information), as well as a good way to perfect mTurk's handling of surveys. They pay 1 cent, but are kinda fun.

Link Update

2005-12-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

Despite the lack of HIT's the mTurk community is still growing. Turking.com and Turker Nation are thriving. Mech Turk Blog is getting plenty of visitors, though unfortunity they don't seem to be posting much. But kpaul is very good about keeping users up to date.

As well recently these sites have emerged

TurkWatch.com - Very Similar in setup to Mech Turk Blog
Aaron's Turking Log - This dude is trying to get to get enough turking done to buy an iBook

Everything else is either still listed in the links to the right, or has died. Kinda a shame to see how many of the blogs haven't been updated for weeks. But that's the way things tend to be. A burst, and then it all dies down.

Outsourcing 2.0

2005-12-15T23:38:00.000-08:00

mTurk has been called the outsourcing of the 21st century...A recent article discusses it well. What is it really? Will projects like this replace traditional outsourcing? mTurk eliminates the equipment costs, the building costs, in fact it eliminates nearly every cost associated with traditional outsourcing...Other then the need to actually pay your workers (Someone's going to make some video game that tricks kids into working for free one of these days though)

As well it's been called one of the best examples of Web 2.0 (we are on the 4th or 5th version of the web already but I'll save that rant)

But when we get down to it...It's simply a solution. A solution to getting a lot of simple work done fast. Of course from here it could evolve into anything. Perhaps it will become the new outsourcing model. One issue with Amazon's basic idea of putting it into programs is that the work isn't necessary done instantly. If mTurk becomes popular among developers, there could quite possibly be more work then workers can do. And a program might have to wait days for it's task to be completed.

I think I can safely say that other major companies, will build mTurk equivalents within the next few years. With bandwidth costs lowing, and companies looking for every way possible to lower costs, this is a great solution. But to be honest...I think things like mTurk will become a reason to learn English for those in China and other countries where $50US a day is great pay. But I am gonna drag as much cash out of mTurk before those in low income countries setup systems to get cash via US Bank Accounts. Or I might just setup a business in a low income country, where I hire those fluent in English to come in and work in a computer lab on mTurk all day. Heh.

Developers Get 1,000 Cash Back from Amazon

2005-12-14T23:40:00.000-08:00

Amazon has just started a promotion in which developers paying for $2,000 worth of HIT's will get $1,00 back. That's a great deal...Has got me thinking about what I might be able to use mTurk's massive army of workers for.

Now my first thought was....Wait a sec scammers could have a heyday. You know make a large amount of HIT's, stick a qualification that only your friends or others in your organization can pass. And bam...You just ripped Amazon off of 1,000 bucks...Repeat with different accounts. But they have it covered (in those official rules that nobody reads)

Qualifying HITs
To qualify for a credit each HIT must: (1) be of a nature that could be completed by any Worker with a reasonable level of skill in the task required by the HIT; (2) not require a particular qualification, knowledge of passwords or knowledge of specific facts that Requester knows are known only to an individual Worker or small group of Workers; and (3) if the Requester is an entity, not be completed by a Worker that is an employee, contractor, shareholder, director, or affiliate of the Requester; or if the Requester is an individual, not be completed by an immediate family member or co-worker of Requester or reside at the same address as the Requester. The price charged by Requester for the HIT must be, in Amazon Mechanical TurkÂs sole discretion, a reasonable approximation of the value of the HIT. The transaction between Requester and Worker must be, in Amazon Mechanical TurkÂs sole discretion, a bona fide purchase of services.

In short it says that qualifing HIT's have to have no qualifications, and that they have to be easy enough that most workers can do them...so podcasts are in....But doing someone's 12 page college essay on neutrons is out. Which I should seriously start....a service that students can submit homework to do on and get completed for a moderate fee. I wonder how teachers would combat such a thing. As well you could have entire websites, in which the creator simply finds the basic infomation and then submits it to mturkers to write out articles and such. Ah now my mind is running away with ideas, heh.

mTurk Seminar

2005-12-13T19:59:00.000-08:00

Hatch over at Turk Lurker participated in the mTurk Developer Seminar tonight and has a nice write up on it. Though, there's no real information from it...That wasn't previously known.

In other news....Nothing. Acris HIT's have been showing up a little, with a few music HIT's, and podcast HIT's...And that's it.

Word Verification

2005-12-12T15:00:00.000-08:00

Apparently the Mechs has added word verification to the HIT's. I haven't seen this myself...Mainly because I haven't seen any HIT's lately....But there's several threads on it.

Hopefully it doesn't show up too often...Once out of every 100 or so is fine...But more often becomes just annoying. But this is a standard anti-bot measure, that works well for most sites. Though usually it's for something like registration, not something like HIT's where a single user does hundreds to thousands a day...So we'll see if it's around for long. Expect tweaking of it, and some weirdness now and then.

Pheromone Trails Survey

2005-12-09T15:44:00.000-08:00

This is the first survey to show up, here's the description, "Take the PheromoneTrail.com survey by clicking the link in the upper right hand corner of this box. You can only take this survey once!" The requestor is "Amazon Requester Inc.". It's simple, though I wish I could take more surveys not just one. Though this one only paid 1 cent.

I suspect that Amazon will begin testing out many HIT's like this. Just as the Image Adjustments, and Music HIT's have been ran multiple times, to test different setups. They are tweaking the systems.

Here is the site that the HIT referred to http://www.pheromonetrail.com/

Tutorial: No Load Time

2005-12-08T23:12:00.000-08:00

Note: Ignore if are an advanced Turker

Download and install Firefox 1.5
Open Firefox and install the TabSwitcher Extension in it
Restart Firefox
Goto Tools > Extensions > Select TabSwitcher > Click Options > Click on the textbox to the right of "Next Tab" > Press the keyboard key or combination of keys that you wish for firefox to goto the next tab when pressed (I suggust F4) > repeat for "Previous Tab" (I suggust F2) > Click "OK > Close Extensions window
Goto find Available HIT's
Find desired HIT group > Right Click "View a HIT in this Group" > Click "Open Link in new Tab" > Repeat for desired number of tabs (I suggest 4-10 depending on your connection speed and Turking speed, experiment)
Now when an HIT is completed and submitting, press your keyboards key(s) for the next tab, and BAM, no need to wait for HIT's to load, just go.

Things to note.

If one of your tabs is on an error screen, press F5 (refresh) and go to the next.

Tutorial: Speed Through Music HIT's

2005-12-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

Note: I've found that many finding my site are looking for simple tutorials on how to use scripts. So I'm going to begin writing simple tutorials for using scripts. Pretty basic. Ignore if you are already running scripts.

Download and install Firefox 1.5
Open Firefox and install the GreaseMonkey Extension in it
Restart Firefox
Right Click Here, and click Install User Script (It's a modification of TurkOp)
Go find Music HIT's
Click "View an HIT in this Group"
Turk your way to Happiness

Things to note.

To turn GreaseMonkey off, click on the icon of a monkey in the bottom-right corner of Firefox
To turn off only this script, go to Tools > Manage User Scripts > Select "Demon's TurkOp Mod" > Uncheck "Enabled"
To exit the script's loop of accepting HIT's, go here, finish the remaining accepted HIT's, it won't accept new ones.

Not Keeping my Eyes on Things

2005-12-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

Today I read through forum posts and such...And I realized I have missed a lot in the last couple of days...Where to begin....

First off there's the Amazon Mechanical Turk Status Update. Which includes the email address to complain to about being unjustly banned. As well as some other interesting tidbits from Jeff Bar.

Secondly, there's a new Turking Resource, the Mech Turk Blog, which is actually much more then just a blog (it has forums and whatnot).

Thirdly....the GreaseMonkey scripters have gone above and beyond the call of duty. This is the script I am now using for music HIT's. I havn't had the time to find the orignal thread of this script....but I'm sure it's somewhere. It's a modification of the TurkOp script, but it finds possible artist names (on google and amazon) and makes them clickable. As well, over at Turking.com there is this thread, which compares the 2nd generation music HIT's scripts, and script modifications. And the TurkOp script itself seems to have some several new features and such. I'll have to devote some time to reviewing all the new scripts later tonight.

Sorry about falling behind....just so distracted by all this stuff that I've bought with Turking money. It's one of those win-lose situations, the more you Turk the more cool stuff you buy, the more cool stuff you buy the less you want to Turk. Oh well....

Ajedrecista

2005-12-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

It's been too quiet. So here's a little program that isn't quite ready but is getting there. Ajedrecista is a plugin based alternative to using a web browser. Granted so far it only has one plugin which is for music HIT's and that's in alpha (The most recent build crashes when I try to use the plugin) Everything else is looking pretty good, the login, stats report and such.

It's not ready to be used but certainly something to keep your eyes on. Lately on MTurk itself there have been Music HIT's mostly and then a few podcast's, and some French/English language translation HIT's...Which look kinda fun...Though I don't know French...In fact I'm still working on my first language English..heh.

Lookup Documents in Acris Website (New HIT Type)

2005-12-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

Ok admitting I returned this HIT, in fact I could barely find anything that resembled the information I was looking for, but still it's a new type of HIT.

Are you fluent in French?

2005-12-02T11:18:00.000-08:00

A new Qualification test has shown up entitled "BTTS English/French Fluency" and here's the description "This is the L1 qualification for the Bitporters Text Translation services. Applicants should be fluent in both languages. The use of online text translation services like babelfish.com will not be tolerated."

I'm not sure what this guy is thinking, according to his blog, he is starting this up to go with Mechanical Turk. Now seriously out of all of you Turkers out there, who is fluent in French and English? Maybe some Europeans, but very few people with US Bank Accounts are fluent, and it's doubtful they would work on something like Mechanical Turk, but maybe I'm just closed minded.