My Travels on the Net
Showing you how to use the Internet to your advantange.Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Cool Tool: Mechanical Turk
I had coffee last week with a web designer here in Portland, OR I work with and he told me about an outsourcing website owned by Amazon called Mechanical Turk. Oh, man. My world has changed!
I do a lot of writing for websites and article marketing and there are two things I’ve long wished I could get cheap:
1. answers to specific questions
2. transcriptions of conversations with clients.
It pains me to admit that I’ve paid virtual assistants $30 to answer questions. And I went into sticker shock when I found out transcriptionists get $180 for an hour long phone call. It’s pretty tough to turn ideas into words when you’re paying those kinds of prices.
So when my website designer pal George, told me about how he’s been using Mechanical Turk to get answers to questions, I was intrigued. He even told me about Andy Baio author of Waxy.org who created an awesome blog post about how he used MTurk to get a transcription of a conversation done quickly and cheaply.
I first tested out MTurk on an answer I’d wasted half an hour trying to fiind for a web page I’m working on. I posted my HIT (MTurk’s name for a question) at about 8:00 PM. The next morning I had an answer with resources that sent me on my way happily writing again
I then tested out Andy’s method for using MTurk to transcribe a conversation I had with a client whose website I am writing. Knowing I was getting a transcription of the conversation was liberating. I could just focus on the conversation instead of having to worry about the notes I was taking. I found that I was asking better questions and getting better content for the website.
Although I’ve never used an audio editing software program before, it did take some time to figure out how to use the free audio editing program to edit the hour long conversation into 10 minute segments. It was a bit of a challenge but well worth the time investment.
Less than 12 hours later I had all 40 minutes transcribed and it cost me $20. Now I’m happily on my way writing again.
I do a lot of writing for websites and article marketing and there are two things I’ve long wished I could get cheap:
1. answers to specific questions
2. transcriptions of conversations with clients.
It pains me to admit that I’ve paid virtual assistants $30 to answer questions. And I went into sticker shock when I found out transcriptionists get $180 for an hour long phone call. It’s pretty tough to turn ideas into words when you’re paying those kinds of prices.
So when my website designer pal George, told me about how he’s been using Mechanical Turk to get answers to questions, I was intrigued. He even told me about Andy Baio author of Waxy.org who created an awesome blog post about how he used MTurk to get a transcription of a conversation done quickly and cheaply.
I first tested out MTurk on an answer I’d wasted half an hour trying to fiind for a web page I’m working on. I posted my HIT (MTurk’s name for a question) at about 8:00 PM. The next morning I had an answer with resources that sent me on my way happily writing again
I then tested out Andy’s method for using MTurk to transcribe a conversation I had with a client whose website I am writing. Knowing I was getting a transcription of the conversation was liberating. I could just focus on the conversation instead of having to worry about the notes I was taking. I found that I was asking better questions and getting better content for the website.
Although I’ve never used an audio editing software program before, it did take some time to figure out how to use the free audio editing program to edit the hour long conversation into 10 minute segments. It was a bit of a challenge but well worth the time investment.
Less than 12 hours later I had all 40 minutes transcribed and it cost me $20. Now I’m happily on my way writing again.
Labels: mechnaicla turk, mturk, reserach, transcription, www.snaptortoise.com
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