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Dolores Labs is a startup that helps companies solve their problems using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a piecework service that allows millions of casual laborers to contribute to "distributable judgment problems" -- like analyzing a large set of photos to find the faces in them, or classifying documents. The brief list of projects they've conducted to date is a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of problems that are tractable with "mechanical turks."
Document Classification: We helped Scribd, an online publisher, classify documents.Link (via Data Mining)Sentiment: We labeled sentiment (buy/hold/sell) for stocks from posts on message boards.
Price Extraction: We extracted prices from popular shopping sites, as well as an open question to find the lowest price on a given product.
Search Relevance: We judged the relevance of a webpage for a search query.
See also: Mechanical Turked color names
I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.
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