Being a webmaster of your own sites can be daunting. You actually have to DO most of the work yourself or find someone else who can do it for you. Some tasks are easier to do using the right software and some are easier using a service.
Using Amazon Mechanical Turk is one of the more brilliant ways to outsource. Of course you have to think about tasks that are easy and quick to work on but still need human intelligence. After funding your account, you create Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs for short) and submit them to the Mechanical Turk. After a surprisingly short time you get results coming in from workers around the globe.
I am just starting to experiment with the possibilities but already find this extremely useful.
Example – using the Advanced HIT tool:
Title: Do You LOVE your Digital Camera?
Description: Give us your quick view on it.
Keywords: digital photo,digital camera,nikon,canon,olympus,pentax,minolta
Expires in: 100 days
Provide Detailed Instructions:
- Go read the example at: http://i.digital-photo-web.com/Olympus-Digital-Camera/Olympus-E500
- Tell us in your own words (100-500) about your own digital camera.
- What brand and exact model is it?
- What do you like about it the most?
- What tasks do you use it for?
- Where would you like to see improvements?
- Thanks in advance for taking the time and giving your input.
Select an Answer Format – Free Text Answer
And finally I pay for my HIT: 100 assignments for $0.05 each.
Yeah – you read that right. I get plenty of results for only 5 cents per completed task!
A few examples with minor editing:
- Canon Digital Ixus 430
- Canon EOS 40D
- Canon ixus 860s
- Canon Powershot SD850 IS
- Canon PowerShot SX100 IS
- Canon PowerShot TX1
- Canon Rebel XT
- Canon XTi
All the results I have got are usable and many give valuable insights.
Comments on this entry are closed.