IT Milk: entry

Now you can really earn a living by working at home on the computer. A few years back I would see many flyers of scams like these posted on telephone poles and walls. But I discovered one of the coolest ideas on the web that lets you work at home without a catch: Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is both a marketplace and an interface for outsourcing information-based repetitive tasks that “people do better than computers.” Instead of sending this work to some questionable labor shop in the Philippines, anyone who has internet access can get a piece of the action.

I tried a Human Intelligence Task that required tagging roadside photos with “bus lane,” “bus stop” and “bike lane.” The company paid me $0.06 for each picture, and it only took 2 seconds to complete one.

So that’s theoretically a very lucrative task, because in a minute I could make $1.80, and in an hour I could make $108. But unfortunately that particular Human Intelligence Task had only 1625 photos available.

There are other tasks like writing captions and creating trivia questions. So there is a niche for nearly everyone.

If you already have an Amazon.com account you can try it out right away.

The news very recently featured the Amazon Mechanical Turk, because a number of satellite photos to analyze were uploaded in an effort to search for a missing Microsoft researcher.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more websites that use this concept in the near future. The possibilities are limitless and companies should definitely take advantage of the entire internet community as a potential labor source.

But I noticed a critical issue: How can a company judge the accuracy and quality of a Human Intelligence Task? Maybe there will be more Human Intelligence Tasks for people with higher privileges to check all the workmanship.