Turk to Develop Web Content — Use Amazon
Amazon Mechanical Turk is an affordable way to create content for your web site.
If you’re trying to jumpstart a review web site, moderate a forum, or get the contact information for potential web site advertisers, Amazon Mechanical Turk can help you do it cheap and fast.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Turk has been around for a while, but I finally had a chance to use it today. Amazon Turk is a “marketplace for work”, and enables a community of users to complete tasks for you.
Today I had a list of 340 firms in the Lakeway area that I want to add to my Lakeway directory. But I needed addresses for each firm. In less than an hour, the Turk community delivered addresses for all 340 firms at a total cost of $37.40.
Here’s how I used Turk. First, I created a template for Turk users to fill out for each firm. Turk provides some samples, and I edited one to fit my needs. Then I decided how much to pay people for each firm they completed (10 cents). Next, I saved my spreadsheet of 340 firms as a CSV. Following uploading the CSV file to Turk, I verified that everything uploaded correctly. Then I hit the submit button.
Within minutes people started fulfilling my request, firm-by-firm. As a stats junky, I got a kick out of the Turk data that instantly popped up on my screen:
The screenshot shows how many responses have been submitted, the average time it takes someone to complete the request, and the effective hourly rate I’m paying people for my project ($6.67).
Here are some ways you can use Amazon Turk to help you build and manage web sites:
-Get reviews for your fresh review web site.
-Review posts on your forum for compliance with terms of service.
-Take a list of fishing firms in Yahoo and get the contact information for each firm so you can try to sell them advertising on your fishing web site.
-Jump start a forum by paying people to post in it
-Pay people to submit your web site to various directories
-Analyze a list of domain names in a way that requires human involvement
