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At Mix06 I saw a presentation on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service by Jeff Barr. This service might be described as a marketplace for small human jobs; one example from the presentation was image processing where workers had to identify invalid images for A9’s Block View. For each image they were paid a few cents to identify the best image for a specific location. It turns out that users could make quite good money; some users even added Xbox controllers to their systems to allow faster processing of images.

I have been thinking how profound it is that the internet is able to, cost effectively, enable such a service. Off the top of my head I can think of 3 other examples of ant farm projects (people working in internet driven collaborative tasks):

1. The stardust@home project where volunteers will painstakingly examine images from the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector at Johnson Space Center in Houston
2. Google answers where users submit a question and it is answered by an expert for a small fee.
3. Here in the UK animal rights protesters have access to a large community of activists all over the world. This community is sometimes used to write complaint letters to bombard targets.

Amazing times we live in!