Will the Mechanical Turk geotag the planet?
This Mechanical Turk is a (slightly) rewarded system to distribute tasks that need humans to be completed has been launched by Amazon and described in detail by Techcrunch.
But which tasks will be assigned to the Turk? First examples in the site are from Amazon itself and, a-ha, looks like they think they can tag, describe, disambiguate or illustrate places. Reminds familiar of our Tagzania tagline: Tagging the plane. Several tasks are destined to the illustrated streetplan system of A9. They reached thousands of street corners, and now seemingly need people to assign the correct pictures to those places.
This is a task I found at the Mturk.com site:
A9 BlockView(tm) Image Adjustment -- Seattle, WA Requester: Amazon Requester Inc. HIT Expiration Date: Nov 6, 2005 (1 day 5 hours) Time Allotted: 60 minutes Reward: $0.03 HITs Available: 13 Description: You are presented with the name and address of a business as well as a set of photos taken along the street where the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the best photo of the business that is listed. Keywords: A9, Blockview(tm), image
I've entered in a task: I had to choose the beste picture for a business building in Phoenix... Then I returned for pictures and the URL to write this post, but there was an error message. Will this micro-rewarded effort tag the planet? Tagzania has a different approach: you tag what you want, not what we need, and you are rewarded with a collection of places (like bookmarks) that you can recall in the future or share with others.