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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Amazon Announces…something
This morning, Amazon Web Services announced a new content delivery service, but hasn’t given much in the way of specifics, costs or details.
It’s interesting they’d create a content delivery network since that’s what many people, myself included, are using S3 for. Perhaps this network will have less latency and better response times then S3 sometimes has.
In an email sent to customers, Amazon writes:
You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.
From the email, the new content delivery service sounds separate from S3. Here’s what we do know.
1. There are no minimum fees and no commitments to use the new content delivery service. You will only pay for what you actually use.
2. A single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
3. Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
If the only difference between this CDN and S3 is a slight increase in performance at an additional cost, I don’t see why I should stop using regular old S3 as a delivery tool. How about a little more direction, Amazon.
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Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge
Amazon is running their second Start Up Challenge - I entered last year with my brilliant idea for a web service that would allow schools to quickly setup and scale emergency websites using Amazon S3 and EC2. I think it was a bit too niche-y, but I did get $25 in AWS credits, so that’s been a nice pile of money to play with and learn more about the system.
Basically - if you have an idea or are building a service that uses any of Amazon’s web services, you can enter their start-up challenge and if you make it all the way to the end, you can win $100,000, half in cash, half in credits - as well as a potential investment offer from Amazon.
You can learn more at their site - but get moving, the deadline for entries is October 3.
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