Beverly Hills HITs running out…

I was lucky enough to have grabbed a dozen of Beverly Hills IA HITs before they all ran out. I’ve only done about 160 HITs today, not a turking day for me I guess…

Error message on Mechanical Turk

Is it just me or is someone else also getting this error message every now and then?

Your request was not completed successfully.

Please try it again. If you continue to receive this message, please try your request again later.

It usually happens when I click a “submit HIT” button after finishing with a HIT. I never realized that when it does happen, the HIT that I’m working on will be stored in the “HITs assigned to you” section… I missed 8 HITs just because of this! When I got the error message I thought it was something about the system and there was nothing I could do… apparently I was mistaken…

So now whenever I see an error message I go resubmit my HITs in the “HITs assigned to you” section, just to make sure no effort is wasted.

Interested in Anaheim and Baltimore IA tasks, anyone?

I’ve been checking the available HITs every few minutes and Amazon’s been adding more HITs to the “Anaheim, CA” and “Baltimore, MD” IA groups. If you’re interested in doing IA for those areas, now is the time!

HIT status – 323 approved

Just checked again. Looks like Amazon (or the Requesters) is working hard clearing the pending HITs now. I just got 323 HITs approved, which leaves about 160+ HITs pending.

Can’t wait

Music – Confirm Artist Name

I’ve been doing IA (Image Adjustment) HITs ever since I started turking, since those were the only HITs available to me. This afternoon the CAN (Confirm Artist Name) HITs started appearing, but I was busy doing the very limited IA HITs left available so I didn’t try it.

But like I said in the previous post, IA HITs were so running out, so when I went back to check my dashboard a few minutes earlier, I decided to give CAN a try.

Well, it turned out to be exactly what I thought – boring and not worth the time.

First all, being a Hongkie who isn’t a big fan of music, most of the albums they showed me were like aliens, foreign and never heard of. Although they do provide a list of possible artist names, it’s just so time-consuming to go through them all and then copy and paste the right one into the answer box. It sure would be more convenient if they provide radio buttons instead of text box.

Then, like I said, I’m not all that into music, so looking at those old albums is an unbelievably boring task for me. It would be impossible to stick to those tasks for more than a few minutes. Btw, some albums don’t even have an image, all you get to hang on to is the album title, wouldn’t it be easier for Amazon to just google the album title and get the artist name in the search results?

Lastly, even if I could bear the boringness and time-consumingness of those CAN tasks, those tasks only worth USD0.02 which is USD0.01 less than the IA tasks!

I wish there were more interesting tasks, but for now, I’m sticking to IA for sure.

So little HITs left…

So I’ve just spent about 30 minutes turking. I learned one thing today, which is NOT TO turk during day time in Hong Kong, especially on a Sunday. There are sooooo little HITs left, and the only available HITs are in remote areas – I was just working on Wilmington, NC, and it was driving me nuts. All the shops are so small are far away from the main road there is no way to tell if it’s the right place, unless they have a hugh sign above the shop – which they usually don’t.

I guess loads of people in the states are spending their Saturday night turking, so I’ll just have to wait till tonight… hopefully I’ll get 2000+ HITs in Beverly Hills (my fav area so far) like I did last night.

Amazon Mechanical Turk server crawling…

Gees… the Mechanical Turk server is at crawling speed…. the Amazon server seems fine though… hope it gets fixed soon…

Still 460 HITs pending…

Just checked my dashboard, 50+ HITs got approved overnight but there are still 400+ pending…

Gonna grab some lunch and start turking soon !

My goal is to make USD200.00 a day turking

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, astrid over at Turker Nation is making over USD200.00 a DAY! Nice innit? Well I have a goal to work toward to from now on…

1st day turking

I read about the Amazon Mechanical Turk when it first came out, but never got the chance to try it as I’ve been busy working on other things.

Who would have guessed that in just 3 short weeks (the service was introduced on Nov 2nd), the WHOLE WORLD is blogging about it and thus I came across the site again.

To be honest, USD0.03 doesn’t look very attractive to me, but since I’ve got time to kill anyway I sat down and played with it. Not long after did I get kinda addicted… It’s pretty much like playing photo hunt and it feels good when the money I’ve earned keeps adding up almost immediately.

I spent about 3 hours turking on and off and submitted about some 500 HITs. The money stopped adding up a while later, probably coz the server (or the people?) got busy when users in the states start turking…

Anyway it’s almost 6am now and I better off to bed. Will post updates when I get to turk tomorrow.