Monday, June 12, 2006

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.

2 comments:

Sherwood said...

As a requester who's tried both the console and HIT Builder, I can tell you that Mturk is being held back by its very beta behavior. That contrasts starkly to the quality of workers - they've delivered far beyond my expectations, especially on writing tasks. I have clients who would love access to that workforce, but they will not invest dev time and dollars to feed a shaky infrastructure.

Faye-Merrill said...

Do I understand that 'auspicious' is saying that between his wife and self they traded 120-140 hours of corporate income in exchange for MTurK??? I must be exceedingly retarded, disinterested in that I only poke around doing 'hits' every once in a great while, and finally, look upon the whole thing as a sort of substitute for crossword puzzles. Therefore, I'd say that the $.41 I have earned in the last three months wouldn't be able to compete with absolutely any 'income' I can possibly imagine. I look at the MTurk as a board game that is played with real pennies. And it is way below the minimum hourly wage; how does that happen, how is that legal? Just curious. I like doing it anyway.