It is surely fun having a large group of worker bees to do my mundane tasks for me.  At least that is what I am discovering since I started using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  I won’t bore you with the meaning behind turks, mturks, etc, as they are covered admirably by Andrew Wee and 45n5.  The best way I can describe it is a way to farm out mundane, repeatable, easily understood tasks to people who you care not to spend the time hiring, by using a technology framework.  What the hell does that mean?

It means, with a few scripts that are written for MTurk to understand, a few configuration files (which can basically be cloned from implementation to implementation), a PHP script or two (total time about 10 minutes), I am able to have people review, classify, comment, create, and otherwise make/enhance my content for me. In my first implementation, I had a series of recipes to be reviewed for proper formatting, to be classified, and to have a sentence or two description written.  We are not talking rocket science.  Each recipe takes about 45 seconds to scan, comment, and classify.  After about 10 of these though my eyes roll and I reach for the beer.

Paying others to do this with essentially micropayment is another matter.  The 50 minutes it took me to set up my first mturk implementation (this includes all coding, configuring, testing, etc), was reduced to 40 minutes the second time around. And now, for a simple mturk implementation, I drop about 30 minutes of time. I pay out a few pennies per action by the reviewer/commentor/classifier/etc.  They make money, I get my work done, we are all happy.

Tweet This Post!