Micro-Crowdsourcing

An article in the NY Times examines Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing system. The system allows people to provide very small tasks that computers can’t do themselves – e.g. spot a traffic sign in a photo on a site. The Times says:

Harnessing the collective wisdom of crowds isn’t new. It is employed by many of the “Web 2.0” social networks like Digg and Del.icio.us, which rely on human readers to select the most worthwhile items on the Web to read. But creating marketplaces of mercenary intelligences is genuinely novel.

….Why do people become Turk Workers and ChaCha Guides? In poor countries, the money earned could offer a significant contribution to a family’s wealth. But even Mr. Bezos concedes that Turk Workers from rich countries probably can’t live on the small sums involved. “The people I’ve seen commenting on blogs seem mostly to be using MTurk as a supplemental form of income,” he said.

What seems to be occuring is the development of (at least) two different types of crowd sourcing – the type where a large sum of money is offered to people outside a company to solve the company’s problems and the micro-sourcing type reflected by Mechanical Turk: micro-payments for micro-tasks.

Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans – New York Times