Making Money
They say that idle hands are the devil’s playground. There may be some wisdom in that. The idea of using crowdsourced human intelligence on the internet is not a new one- but one which has never truly been done justice. Until now.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, riding on the coattails of its AWS service — is perhaps the most mature attempt at establishing a marketplace for Human Intelligence Tasks. There are two types of users for Mechanical Turk- Requesters and Workers.
Requesters post a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) on the server, Workers pick them up and perform the simple task — which may be something like choosing your favourite marketing campaign out of a list, or filling out a survey to help out college professors who are working on research products. The human aspect is important here- as it ensures that the system will not be replaced by some automated algorithm.
The people who performed the task are then compensated with Amazon.com gift certificates, which can be used to purchase products from the website. Amazon charges 10% of the amount paid to the Workers as its fee for providing the service. So if you have a lot of free time, try it out on www.mturk
.com/mturk/welcome.
Making a few extra dollars is always fun, and with today’s rupee conversion rates you might actually be able to earn enough to cover expenses just by spending some spare time doing simple tasks online.
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