Let’s talk about Short Task and Amazon Mechanical Turk. These are “crowdsourcing” websites, offering small tasks one can do on line (for typically very little money).
Now, as my employment is iffy these days I’m looking to bring in a few extra bucks any way I can. Thus, these are somewhat attractive. However…
I signed on to Short Task. Well, I tell ya, some of the “seekers” need someone to write coherent task descriptions for them! Spelling errors, grammar errors… well, I suppose that’s one reason to seek outside help. I do find it off-putting that a large number of their jobs seem to be “rate X with a high number of stars/positive/excellent rating” to pad and improve ratings on various sites. Hmm… don’t feel too good about that, seems a little dishonest. They also seem to feaure “write a 300 word article using these three keywords about this job site”… um, OK, but what do you want me to say? How wonderful it is that all these jobs are listed here for these professions? How wonderful job search boards are, here’s an example?
It’s not that I was expecting something earth-shattering, but maybe something a little less sleezy? I’m going to check out AMT, but I’d be interested in knowing other people’s thoughts and impressions. Also, are there any effective task-searching strategies? Paging through 100 pages of stuff, most of which doesn’t suit me, doesn’t seem terribly efficient.