For Twenty Cents An Hour

Have you heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk?

I recently signed up for a Mechanical Turk account, having heard of it over a year ago but having never checked it out. It revealed itself to be a broker of microtransactions for digital information services, a sort of classified ads for mind numbing tasks that can't yet be done by computer alone. The account I created was that of a worker: someone who scans the list of tasks created by Requesters, and accepts those of interest.

I discovered, unsurprisingly, most of the job offerings were crap, unless you're a master of the 400 word essay. Assignments, or Human Intelligence Tasks, range mostly from five dollars to a penny per task. The high paying work rewards "answer simple questions on a 'mom advice' site" and "transcribe 10 minutes of audio," while the low end runs towards "fill out this survey" or "Digg my site." A note of caution: Although most of the easy jobs are surveys or Requesters using you to artificially generate hits, a number of them ask you to enter your personal information on another site. Don't take those. Clever tricks by scammers and spammers.

All in all I'd say the site is for essayists and the bored. The average Worker would be hard pressed to make even five dollars an hour with any regularity, but if you're awake at two in the morning there are worse ways to waste your time.



Soundtrack: The Beatles - Lady Madonna
Cat: On the futon