July 3rd System Upgrade

A new message was posted on the Mechanical Turk today from Amazon:

We are upgrading our system on Tuesday, July 3rd, between the hours of 12:00am and 3:00am PDT. During these times, users will not be able to register for new Mechanical Turk accounts. Some users will be not be able to transfer funds or view account balances. Existing users can still submit HITs, but some payments will be delayed until the upgrade has finished. Statistics may also be inconsistent during this maintenance period, but will be correct after the system upgrade.

Back to Turking

There's a book I want to order from Amazon, so I've been doing some Turking again the last few days. It's still not as fun as the good old days right after it launched, but I've managed to make a few buck while laying on the couch late at night. I did about 50 short transcription hits for Videojug.com over the weekend, but so far they haven't been approved. The "Are these watches different?" hits from Amazon remind me of the good old days somewhat, since they're quick to do, but they seem to trickle them out and they're quickly gone. I probably won't have the patience to get ripped off for my work long enough to get the entire amount I need for the book, but it was fun to spend a few hours back in the slave yard.

eMail from Amazon

I haven't gotten any eMail from Amazon about The Mechanical Turk for months, but last week I got one telling me about new hits available. The Geospatial Vision hits look very interesting, but also somewhat time consuming, especially for $0.08 a hit. I'm sure my little buddy Eric will be all over them, but he's desperately trying to avoid getting a real job anyway. I checked too late to see what the Enrovia Research hits were like. They must have been pretty good since there don't appear to be any available today.

MTurk Mentioned on MSN.com

The Mechanical Turk was mentioned in an article on MSN.com by Liz Pulliam Weston that talked about jobs you can do from home. As usual, they made MTurk sound like a great idea, but then pointed out the truth that most jobs there just don't pay very well.

Personally, I've been scanning the available hits every few weeks myself and there's just doesn't seem like there's much worth doing out there right now. Still no "killer apps," which has plagued the project since the beginning.

A Great Charity For Turkers

Over at the Turker Nation messageboards, Turker Iteki mentioned a great charity that is set up in a way that makes it extremely easy for Turkers to contribute to.

Child's Play is a charity set up by Internet gamers that allows you to browse a wish list on Amazon, then select an item from the list and purchase it through Amazon, who will send it on to the hospital that requested the item. So Turkers can spend some of their hard earned credit to help out sick kids all across the country.

Even if you're not currently turking, please consider donating to this very worthy cause.

http://www.childsplaycharity.org/

Quoted

I was interviewed recently by Wired Magazine about my previous experiences with the Mechanical Turk. A 30 minute phone interview turned into a two-sentence quote in the June 2006 issue. If you'd like to read the article, follow this link. My quote is on page four. I don't remember using the word "gimpy", but maybe I did. What I was trying to say was that MTurk seems to be in a pause right now, with little in the way of interesting work, and it's just waiting for someone to come up with a good way to make use of it's full potential.

Apparel Color Normalization

I haven't been very active with the Mechanical Turk recently, but today I saw a type of hit I haven't seen before. They're called Apparel Color Normalization and it involves the turker looking at a very small swatch of color on the screen and choosing the closest matching color from a list with adjacent radio buttons.

The hits are from Amazon Requestor and are paying two cents each. I did five just to check them out and they can be completed fairly quickly. I did notice that several didn't actually have images to judge, so I skipped those. I suspect these are just to provide more traffic on the MTurk website since they have claimed that the Mechanical Turk will come out of Beta soon.

One other minor curiousity I noticed is that they used the British spelling for the color "grey" instead of the normal American "gray." I have no idea why I'm mentioning this, but it did catch my eye while I was working on the hits.

MTurk Market Forces

I realize blogs are not expected to be fact checked. I've made some assumptions that weren't true on this and my other blogs I'm sure. I just wanted to point out a nitpick in an otherwise excellent blog entry by Erica Sadun about the Mechanical Turk.

The blog entry states "Early tasks that started at 75 cents, soon dropped to 65, and from 65 to 60, and from 60 to 40, all the way down to the current rate of about 1-3 cents per task." This statement is somewhat misleading I feel, since the earliest hits did pay 75 cents, but required a good deal of work on the part of the Turker doing the work. These hits involved doing product write-ups, usually on auto parts. The price paid on these dropped gradually, but not all the way down to 3 cents. The hits that paid 3 cents or less were the Image Adjustment hits or the Artist Title hits, which took considerably less time.

I do agree that market forces are in play on the Mechanical Turk. The Casting Words hits are a perfect example of this. It's my opinion though that market forces were not having much effect on MTurk in the heyday soon after it's SlashDotting. I think Amazon was simply setting prices on a whim to see what they could get away with.