Using oDesk for microtasks by Panos Ipeirotis.
From the post:
Quite a few people keep asking me about Mechanical Turk. Truth be told, I have not used MTurk for my own work for quite some time. Instead I use oDesk to get workers for my tasks, and, increasingly, for my microtasks as well.
When I mention that people can use oDesk for micro-tasks, people get often surprised: “oDesk cannot be used through an API, it is designed for human interaction, right?” Oh well, yes and no. Yes, most jobs require some form of interviewing, but there are certainly jobs where you do not need to manually interview a worker before engaging them. In fact, with most crowdsourcing jobs having both the training and the evaluation component built in the working process, the manual interview is often not needed.
For such crowdsourcing-style jobs, you can use the oDesk API to automate the hiring of workers to work on your tasks. You can find the API at http://developers.odesk.com/w/page/12364003/FrontPage (Saying that the API page is, ahem, badly designed, is an understatement. Nevertheless, it is possible to figure out how to use it, relatively quickly, so let’s move on.)
Panos promises future posts with the results of crowd-sourcing experiments with oDesk.
Looking forward to it because waiting for owners of data to disclose semantics looks like a long wait.
Perhaps a permanent wait.
And why not?
If the owners of data “know” the semantics of their data, what advantage do they get from telling you? What is their benefit?
If you guessed “none,” go to the head of the class.
We can either wait for crumbs of semantics to drop off the table or we can setup our own table to produce semantics.
Which one sounds quicker to you?