Refreshing the blog

Ok, I’m going to get with what the cool kids are doing and refresh this oft-neglected blog a bit by following these instructions to auto-post via posterous and worry less about coming up with completely unique content.  I need to work on flexing my writing muscles in an environment beyond the office.
Step one, I actually [...]

Mechanical Turk Idol

Last week I decided to have some fun and post a request on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for people to sing songs for cash.  I asked for 20 original songs at 50 cents apiece and ended up receiving 12 valid entries and 3 bogus ones within the 7 days I allotted.  Please have a listen below [...]

My Mechanical Turk Optimization Tips

Image via CrunchBase

Ever since The Sheep Market, I’ve been curious about exploring the potential of Mechanical Turk for fun little tasks, rather than it’s main purpose as a brutally cheap and efficient marketplace for repetitive tasks.
My own silly idea was to pay people a relatively fair wage of 25 cents to record themselves singing short [...]