Getting There

I had planned to write about how troubled and frustrating the Mechanical Turk was yesterday. It was troubled and frustrating yesterday, there's no doubt about that. I submitted over 300 hits by the time I went to sleep last night and only about 25 had been processed. I was getting close to having over 1000 hits still in Pending status. The MTurk systems seemed to be overloaded yesterday as well. There were lots of page errors and the Image Adjustment hits were a strange conglomeration of all three of the None of The Above options we've seen so far.

I was prepared to write a fairly harsh blog entry this morning, but when I looked at my account this morning there were over 500 of my pending hits processed while I slept. Bliss! My rejection rate is down to almost 10% and I'm now over halfway in my quest to acquire a new Petzl Ecrin Roc helmet.

So in short, MTurk has some problems, but it's still one of the coolest projects on the Internet in my own humble opinion. If I had to fault them for anything, it would be that they're not communicating with their userbase effectively yet. There's no official MTurk announcement board or blog, and the only way we're getting much official news right now is from the emails from customer service that we're sharing with each other over on Turker Nation.