I made 30 cents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk before the site got Slashdotted and all the simple tasks got used up. I was identifying photos of shop fronts in Boston. It gives you a page with a business name, an address, and 5 pictures. Your task is to select the photo that matches the business address. In only one case was the actual business name present. All the others either were businesses in a big building with no store front, or there was just no photo that matched at all. This is just one example of uses for Mechanical Turk. It is an interesting idea… one that we were actually discussing after the Berkman luncheon the other day. It could actually be used to build a seed database for Artificial intelligence systems to use, which Mako says MIT is working on.

One interesting thing that I came across in the photos themselves is the vehicle that was used to take the store front photos (see photo). It appears to be nothing more than an SUV with a video camera on top. The photos are used in Amazon’s A9 map. I find them useless in most cases. The photos are head-on and very tight which gives you a very limited view of the building. They really should taking the photo at an angle and with a wider angle lens. All that trouble they’ve gone through, you’d think they’d try to do it right.