Ok, I’ve thought a bit about Amazon ’s Mechanical Turk service. It’s a platform for folks to write computer programs that need small amounts of work from human beings as part of their input. You supply some cash. Amazon supplies the people. The people supply the thinking. Very, very clever.
Marty and Brian are very, very excited. There are some neat things that one could do with this — like building a media contact database, or transcribing audio and video recordings.
But as I read the initial wave of blog posts about the Mechnical Turk, I notice a distinct scarcity of interesting ideas for how to actually apply peer production to organizing and/or advocacy problems. The skeptic in me can’t help but wonder: how many organizing and advocacy problems are really out there that can be solved by small bits of labor from many unskilled people in front of their computers?
I’d like to see more ideas about important problems that could be solved with this approach. I just can’t think of many. Maybe I’m just blocked. Or maybe there’s less to be excited about here than we might wish to think. Or maybe it’s 12:45 AM and I should just go to bed.
Mechanical Turk can’t solve everything
I like it when I see Web 1.0 companies rollout new and innovative services. Last week, Amazon launched a new service, Mechanical Turk. According to their about pages, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk ’solves the problem of building applications …