Friday, October 5, 2007

Crowdsourcing for a Billionaire

When billionaire Steve Fossett went missing in September, friends and colleagues used online "crowdsourcing" as part of their coordinated search efforts. Through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the public was paid to look at high resolution areal photos in hopes of spotting Fossett's wreckage.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is described as tool used to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it." Although Fossett's wreckage has yet to be found, many other companies are using crowdsourcing to carry out different projects and reshape makes group projects go global with the click of a mouse.

Amazon Mechanical Turk: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
WIRED: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

1 comment:

Ken (EnvironmentalChemistry.com) said...

Those participating in the Mechanical Turk search for Steve Fossett are NOT being paid for their efforts. It is entirely volunteer.