On Amazon Mechanical Turk, thousands of people are happily being paid pennies to do mind-numbing work. Is it a boon for the bored or a virtual sweatshop?
By Katharine Mieszkowski
A picture of a woman's pink shoe floats on my computer screen. It's a flat, a street version of a ballet shoe. My job is to categorize the shoe based on a list of basic colors: Is it red, blue, pink, purple, white, green, yellow, multicolored? A description next to it reads "Pink Lemonade Leather." This is not exactly a brain-busting task; I'm doing it while talking to a friend on the phone. With the mouse, I check a box marked "pink." In the next split second, a picture of a navy blue shirt appears. I check "blue." Assuming my answers jibe with those of at least two other people being paid to scrutinize the same pictures, I've just earned 4 cents.With my computer and Internet connection, I have become part of a new global workforce, one of the thousands of anonymous human hands pulling the strings inside of a Web site called Amazon Mechanical Turk. By color-coding the clothing sold by the online retailer, which helps customers to search for, well, pink shoes, I can now call myself a Mechanical Turker. In this new virtual workplace, everything is on a need-to-know basis, including who is doing the work, what the point of the work is and, in some cases, the very identity of the company soliciting the work.
Click thru to the article to read a great overview of this service. I make $1.45 a week and I love it" | Salon Technology
