Who is Mechanical Turk?
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Amazon Mechanical Turk. What’s that you ask? Good question.
Mturk, for short, is Amazon’s human-powered marketplace. Just like you can provision servers on demand, with Mturk you provision small work units that you pay people to complete. These are often small tasks, such as a web search or transcribing a few seconds of audio, and for the work that you do, you get paid, from a penny per unit on up. If you’re concerned about the quality of the responses you get, you can assign each task to multiple people, so it’s done two or three times and you can verify the quality of the response.
Here’s a quick video about the service from the user perspective.
Anyone can also submit work units to Amazon to be completed. Here are three really interesting blog posts about people’s positive experiences with Mturk.
NewsCred.com used the service to help categorize RSS feeds.
iamelgringo.com used the service to verify 6,000 business URLs and addresses. His project was completed in 5 days at a total project cost of $300.
Andy Baio used Mturk to transcribe an audio interview, breaking it down into small chunks for easy transcribing. Transcriping 36 minutes of audio took only 3 hours and cost $15.40.
Are there uses for this type of service in higher ed? It sounds like it could really help on grunt work or large sets of data that need verified or cleaned up.
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S3Stat tracks your cloud usage
One of the downsides of Amazon’s S3 service is that the reporting stats you get back are, to the naked eye, tough to decipher. It’s a spreadsheet full of times and values and bytes. It doesn’t give you a clear idea of performance, trends or popularity of items.
Enter S3Stat.com.
Every night, they will parse your S3 logs and transform them into Apache logs, which can be run through Webalizer and output back to an area on S3 where you can analyze to your heart’s extent. The stats are ongoing, so you can easily go back and check out last month or earlier in the year, which is nice. Here’s a quick screen grab:
S3Stat Screenshot
The one caveat is that you give S3Stat your S3 login and pass. That allows them to grab you logs and post the results back to your S3 account. This is similar to giving your login to RightScale to manage your EC2 resources. S3Stat has done nothing to question my trust in them, so we’ll continue to use the service.
Signing up for the service is easy, and you get a free 30 day trial. After that, the service is miniscule $2 a month. That’s a small price to pay for not having to wade through Amazon’s default stats.
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Webinar Registration Deadline
Friday, September 19 is the registration deadline for this webinar. If you haven’t yet registered, please do.
On September 24 at 1 p.m. EST, I will be presenting a webinar with HigherEdExperts.com entitled Beyond YouTube: How to host and promote your online videos on the Web.
This webinar will provide an overview of the available video sites out there including the different types of YouTube channels, affordable and scalable cloud hosting, Facebook, Vimeo and more. He will also share tips and best practices to promote and track the success of your videos on the Web.
Whether your institution is just getting into online video or you’re experienced, I think you’ll find this webinar informative and educational. You can register online.
I’ve attended as well as spoken at several webinars put on by HigerEdExperts.com and they are always informative and get you thinking. Karine Joly, HigherEdExperts wrangler and EduWeb keynote speaker, always makes sure that things are running smoothly and the sessions are productive.
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