Comments on: Amazon Embraces Human Filtering

By: mailcircuit

mailcircuit — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 12:26:23 +0000

This Idea is great, but I dont think its possible..
but it doesnt hurt to try.

By: Newsvine: The Wisdom Of The Crowd at connectingthedots

Newsvine: The Wisdom Of The Crowd at connecting*the*dots — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 07:49:23 +0000

[...] In the final analysis, if Newswire succeeds, it’ll be because of the participatory nature of people. So if Davidson really wants to make his mark on this planet, he’ll not only decide to share advertising revenue with the organizations and the content creators themselves, but the swarms of participating editors — editors removed from the burden and balancing act of management, reduced simply to individual citizens focused on making our communities that much more aware, educated and inclusive. If an incentive program can be devised along these lines– some type of a micro-payment structure based on Karma points and click-throughs for both editors *and* authors– he’ll be responsible for creating the Mechanical Turk of the media world. [...]

By: Ethan

Ethan — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 16:15:58 +0000

Lawrence – I love the idea. I think the challenge is identifying the problems where human filtering could help on developing world problems. For instance, do satellite photos exist of places where one might want to place wells? Is it easy or difficult to train folks to identify those sites? Those are the sorts of challenges smart programmers have to figure out before you can turn a task over to a team that does human filtering.

By: Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Voices from Zimbabwe Plus

Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Voices from Zimbabwe Plus — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 09:49:23 +0000

[...] Read Ethan Zuckerman’s discussion of this scheme here. [...]

By: Lawrence MacDonald

Lawrence MacDonald — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 17:35:36 +0000

Ethan – Thanks for a fascinating and informative summary of this new approach to solving particular types of problems. I like that you see this as a possible source of employment for people in the developing world. I’m also wondering if there aren’t some problems of development that could be approached this way. Finding sites for wells based on satellite photos? Identifying disease clusters? Anybody have a better idea?

By: mtl3p

mtl3p — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 20:21:22 +0000

collaboration 2.0

(ducks) Well, c’mon… What else do you want me to call it? Amazon is now bringing us micro-outsourcing(pat’s writeup) Amazon Embraces Human Filtering (ethan’s writeup). superb project that brings collaborative annotation to BBC content (pat’s writ…

By: Office Max!

Office Max! — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 19:21:21 +0000

Amazon Embraces Human Filtering

Seems like the Internet is one big human filter….

By: EmailHosting.com

EmailHosting.com — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 16:52:42 +0000

Human filtering will never work as there is way too much to sift through these days on the net. It’s great but impossible.

By: PaulY

PaulY — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 10:01:11 +0000

Hi,

We are very interested in this model of data collection. But because Yellowikis (www.yellowikis.org) is free and open it is possible for anyone to sell their Human Intelligence services to a local businesses. The ‘editor’ adds their clients contact information to the Yellowikis database – and gets to keep everything they can earn, cash in hand. We just provide the infrastructure that is indexed every few days by Google so clients quickly appear in the Google search results.

Result: Happy client, Happy Editor.

Let me know if you think this might work in Accra. Maybe we can set-up a pilot programme?

By: sean coon

sean coon — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 08:20:54 +0000

Hey Ethan, thanks for providing your always valuable “360 degrees of perspective” on this particular topic. I too tried to revue the service, but ran into similar difficulties and eventually gave up.

When I met with the A9 team last June, I presented a perspective on their Yellow Pages service within the context of technology serving human needs. While we didn’t quite meet at the apropos time—they were really just looking for an interface designer grunt to whip out layout—I did have a few interesting conversations over the course of the day.

A9 is very algorithm oriented (“A9″ standing for the nine letters in the word “algorithm”), as is the majority of the Valley (as you well know). The interesting part of our conversation that day dealt with the potential partnership between human participation *and* mathematical techniques of information retrieval. We spent a good deal of time discussing persona modeling and context scenarios which could drive instances of smart folksonomies, from both a BtoB perspective and an end-user interaction model.

The Mechanical Turk concept is a pretty smart way to begin the merger between thesauri-level tags across multi-level information objects; information retrieval and intelligent presentation in the interface is moving forward at light speed.

And it would be *criminal* if Amazon didn’t open up this service to all of the world’s inhabitants.