Wednesday, December 07, 2005

The new "Earn Money Working From Home..."



Have you ever seen those homemade signs that are attached to utility poles, usually around stoplights? They say, "Earn $$$ working from home!" and include a phone number.

Usually, they're either a Ponzi scheme or a job stuffing thousands of envelopes a day. Fun. Joy.

Well, our friends at Amazon have decided to take this idea to 2.0 with their Amazon Mechanical Turk concept. They promote it as:

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.


It's an interesting premise. There are a lot of jobs that a human can do quite easily, but a computer has difficulty in completing. I decided to take a look at the HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that were available.

If you're expecting big bucks, keep on looking. Only three HITs came up for me, two had no "reward" (payment) and one was paying $0.02 to listen to songs and determine the exact name of the album's primary artist. The good news is that there are 105,035 songs available to identify, or about $2,100 for a lucky audiophile.

Very interesting premise. Most HITs require Qualifications, either a fancy resume or experience in delivering high qualiy answers. I assume the rewards for higher end tasks are higher than FREE or $0.02.

Take a look at the site here.

-aB

Monday, December 05, 2005

I Bet the Neighbors Love It. Not.



Meet Carson Williams. He has done some decorating for the holidays. About 25,000 lights twinkle in his front yard. Did I mention they twinkle to music? To Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Wizards in Winter"?

It's great. No, it's awesome.

Take a look at a 3 minute video here.

Read about it in The Cincinnati Enquirer here. Thanks to AdRants.com for the link.

You have to check it out. Still laughing.

-aB