What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? It’s a web service that enables you to “complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.”
Amazon describes it thusly: “…when we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?”
So here’s my list of Web 2.0 things I want done, that people could do for me better than computers could:
10. Get an A-Lister to link to me every day (probably can be solved by someone doing various small favours for them, on my behalf).
9. Manually filter my Rojo account at least daily – especially removing the duplicates from my topic feeds.
8. Translate all the best Asian Web 2.0 blogs into English (seriously, I want someone to do that!)
7. Insert Technorati tags and all that other microformat crap into my posts.
6. Enter my blog details into the Ping-o-matic page whenever I post something – and while you’re at it, submit my posts to Digg and Slashdot.
5. Click on my Google ads from time to time.
4. Listen to all the podcasts that I never have time to listen to – and report back to me with a summary of what they said.
3. Cook me some spicy noodles, the way Jing Jing in Palo Alto makes them.
2. Turn up to the TechCrunch BBQs on my behalf and constantly remind people that I’m the Father of Web 2.0.
1. Convince a Silicon Valley company to sponsor my US work visa.
