This is interesting. I got this from Amazon today. I think they think I'm a "requester." Essentially it looks like they're trying to market Mechanical Turk to more users. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Requester: We are excited to announce the launch of the Mechanical Turk Resource Center. The new Resource Center includes sample use cases and customer interviews demonstrating how businesses are using Amazon Mechanical Turk for a wide variety of work including web site moderation, data governance, metadata creation and more. The Resource Center also includes a Best Practices Guide to help you optimize your approach and get the best results with Mechanical Turk. Click on the link below to visit the new Resource Center http://requester.mturk.com/mturk/resources Thank you for choosing Amazon Mechanical Turk, The Amazon Mechanical Turk Team http://www.mturk.com/
It's definitely worth checking out, especially the Best Practices Guide to see what advice Amazon is giving requesters. Much of it is very helpful, and if followed would improve the MTurk experience quite a bit for everybody. I have a quibble with the section about paying workers, but it's possible a strange example they gave included a typo. I'm going to get in touch with them and see if they'll clear it up. By the way, in the Guide they suggest that requesters communicate with workers via online forums, but didn't include this one as an example. How about joining me in sending them a note letting them know you'd like to see our forum mentioned in the Best Practices Guide too?
What I mean is that I'm not sure whether it'll be appropriate for me (Worker, not a Requester, at least as yet) to make a suggestion related to a Guide that's meant for the Requesters. Hope you get my point.
I've finally started writing (yay!), so at some point I will need some editing done. I thought about using mturk because I could break up the work versus having one person do it if I list it some place like Elance. I just happened to stumble on that guide and realized why there are so many 'new' requesters with full/closed qualifications. I also realized why that SMR person never responded to my PM. Then, I realized that I will NEVER give out my worker ID to another requester outside of mturk. I learned a lot this weekend.