Hi all, Soon I will be launching a new mturk blog (mturkunion.com) which will be separate from mturk forum. If you are interested in helping out and you are a good, creative, funny (at times) writer then please send me an email andy AT furca.com with the subject line: mTurk Union detailing your writing skills and why you think you should be chosen to help out. The main goal of the blog is to pretty much be a voice for the mturk worker, share some insight, and be somewhat journalistic/scholarly. There will be compensation for your insight, however that should not be the only factor motivating you to help. I am looking for people who love to write. The blog will pretty much be in a wordpress setup, similar to a news site. Basically, when a new blog entry goes out, an email will be sent to everyone on the mailing list. So, you will likely have a lot of people reading your entries and commenting. Also, it is very likely that this site will get a lot of Google traffic and be ranked in the top 5 results for "mturk" on Google. Could provide some good "side project" material for a resume, ie: you are evaluating and writing about the crowd-sourcing environment on mturk. Thank you!
I think I would enjoy this, but since I only have a month of experience on MTurk so far, I'm not sure that my insight would be as valuable as others'.
I'm actually curious about the time dedicated to the project. How many posts a week, and how many words per post and all that. Also, will HTML/CSS knowledge be helpful for a applicant?
Maybe like one post a week, on rotation and you can pre-write the post a week before. The idea is to release 1 post per day. No word count and no coding knowledge needed. Very simple interface.
Is the blog's tone intended primarily as pro MTurk? I'd like to see a blog that covered the good, bad and ugly -- the way it really is, I mean. (like most, I bet, I have a love-hate relationship with MTurk)
Probably around 7-10. Basically, a new post will be scheduled for release at 3:01 AM PST every single day. But, the posts can be written in advance of course and then placed in the queue for scheduling release.
Sounds good! I actually know Wordpress quite well so I think I have a good idea on how it is going to be set up. I've done some ghost writing but would love an opportunity to use this to help build my resume. I'll shoot you off an email here soon I think about this.
Yeah, and to get easy subscribers I will probably add an area to the registration box on mturk forum registration page for "Receive blog post updates from mTurkUnion.com" which should easily increase viewership. Of course, it will be super easy for them to unsubscribe as well if they wish to do so (at the bottom of every email sent).
You should set up entries with an MTurk hit. Any hit done perfectly goes on as a blog post. Anybody who doesn't hack it in even the most trivial way is rejected and given a hard block. No need to tell them why.
Can we suggest blog topics (even if we don't necessarily want to write them)? I'd love to see investigative reporting type articles or posts. Like, documenting how hard it is to contact someone at Amazon about a problem from a worker's viewpoint. (Maybe we could shame them into giving us a dedicated contact #) BTW, is MTurk Union the blog's title, and is it intended to connote worker/labor union or a united front?
It's just the title of the blog, but it is a play on the union concept. Also, union implies connection - which is what I hope the blog will achieve with both workers and requesters. Yes, I am sure we would take topic suggestions.
I've been writing articles about mturk forever but I think I'm too much of a realist for this crowd. Which is probably why I'm always being asked to do interviews about mturk by watchdog groups concerned about our exploitation.