I’d heard about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk before, but never really had a chance to play. It’s a system to allow you to earn cash for doing jobs computers can’t do for companies and individuals.
But don’t start hoping you could earn much cash from your desktop. The average pay for work ranges from $0.01 to under $1. Ignoring the crappy exchange rate, and bearing in mind most tasks will take at least five minutes or more…I’d guess the best wage you could earn is about $9 an hour.
It also seems home to people seeking spam comments packed with keywords, or to get marketing and survey calls made for them.
But my favourite has to be the request from Steve Stedman.
He’s offering $0.01 for a comment of any kind on his blog. Which is kind of fair enough I guess, if he’s desperate for any kind of affirmation (but isn’t it a bit like hiring an escort?).
But he makes one cardinal sin in his HIT request on Mechanical Turk:
“No reference to Mechanical Turk should ever be made in your comments.”
That turns it into a cynical exercise. And it’s made me completely disregard any comments on his blog, of which there are quite a few…I’m also now suspicious about the actual content and purpose of his blog…Which I ‘spose I should link here. I’m quite tempted to spam it with mechanical turk links…