Writing a "Short Story"

Slowing down a little bit-- I've been busy with my day job! Went online this morning and filtered for jobs that pay more than .50. If you haven't already gotten it, I highly recommend installing Turkopticon if you regularly Turk-- it can tell you reasonably quickly whether a HIT is a waste of time.

In any case, I found a HIT that pays .51, and the requester (Sofia Wright) was reasonably well rated on Turkopticon:

The job was to write a Short Story:

Write a short dialog between a travel agent and you.
The topic of the story is:
Imagine that you are going on a family vacation, and you are making arrangements for a place to stay.  Please use the "Booking Details" below, and definitely make sure that you will be staying at a child-friendly hotel. Write both sides of a realistic conversation you might have with a travel agent.
Booking Details:
City: San Diego, CA
Check in Date: July 2nd 2012
Check out Date: July 7th 2012
Number of Guests: Two adults, 3 children
Price Range: $130 - $210
Room Type: with two double beds
Amenities: DVD player

We want 6 -10 turns for each of the people in the conversation.
Please spell check your story.
Write it as if you are speaking it.
Example of writing style and format:
Hi, how are you?
I'm fine thanks, how about you?
Doing well. So what's new?
Not much, just the usual.

Anyways, wrote a quick dialog in about 10 minutes. Not sure it was worth the time, but was reasonably interesting!

Approved earnings so far on mturk-- slowly but surely:

Gaddy again - $1

After briefly hunting around for a better option, I went with my current standby option-- writing a 150-word article for John Gaddy. I decided to accept the HIT to write an article about "hotels near Dulles airport," which was fairly easy to do-- took 12 minutes and pays $1. Not bad. Anyways, enough for today-- maybe something more interesting will pop up tomorrow.

Saved by a Survey! Still tough to find good HITs.

Tried moving a little bit downmarket today and looked for .25 tasks. Ended up picking up a task created by CrowdSource called "Choose the Best Search Result."

For .36 (.03 per keyword set), the goal was to type a set of keywords into Google and choose the best search result. For example, I was supposed to type "nathan bliss" into Google and then choose the URL I thought matched that keyword best-- in this case, http://www.nathanbliss.net/nathan.htm.

It ended up taking me about 8 minutes for this job-- a little under a minute per keyword. I would probably get faster if I kept going, but I decided to try something different. Browsing around, I found another HIT-- Get Similar Product Links from Image. The instructions:

I wasted about 5 minutes on this. I thought it would be easy, but it turns out to be fairly difficult to find clothes that are similar to the ones on the site, so I ended up returning each of these HITs back to the pile for some other Turker to find.

Finally, I just went to a tried-and-true Alcohol Consumption and Personality Survey that pays .75. This took me 12 minutes.

Gotta say that for the money, I think I still like the writing tasks so far.

The Beginning: $6.41

I just started Turking a week or so ago, and so far, I've earned $6.41 with a few hours' work!

What is the Turk? "Turking" is the term people use to describe working jobs on the Amazon Mechanical Turk. If you don't know what the Mechanical Turk is, you can read up on it in more detail here, but the essential idea is that Requesters post jobs (HITs, short for Human Intelligence Tasks) that can be worked by Workers. These HITs can be anything a Requester wants-- taking a survey, writing a short article, writing descriptions of images, anything. Each of these HITs can pay anywhere from 1 cent to upwards of $1, $2, or more:

The best thing about the Turk is that it offers immediate gratification. If you're interested in earning a buck online-- guaranteed-- and want the buck to be in your bank account within a few days, the Amazon Mechanical Turk is by far the best way I've seen to do it.

So far, I think it's actually a lot more fun than I had feared. I'm not sure that's saying a lot, but I had heard anecdotal stories that the power of the market had ground the average earning power on the Turk to pennies per day. So far, while some HITs have been like that, I haven't found that to be the case in general.

The goal of this blog is for me to describe my experiences with the Turk and to help those who want to Turk for fun and profit. I have a steady day job, but I find that the Turk is more fun and intellectually stimulating than watching TV. Actually, to be more accurate-- for the Internet junkies among us, it's something fun to do on the Internet that will easily pay for your coffee habit while watching TV!

As I blog, I'm also going to try to give folks tips as I learn about the Turk. My first tip is this: like anything else in life, choose wisely. Keeping sane and making money on the Turk is 100% about choosing the right tasks for you. I spent my first 30 minutes on the Turk trying to find contact names on websites for .01 apiece. This turned out to be a gigantic waste of time. I first had to take a Qualification Test to show that I could find names on websites, and after that I earned .01 per website. If all Turk tasks were like that one, my one piece of advice would be to do something else.

Fortunately, not all tasks were like that. Next, I tried describing images. For each picture, I had to write two sentences and was paid .04 per picture. I ended up going through 25 of these before giving up again:

Still, not the most satisfying writing in the world. While I don't necessarily want to write the next War and Peace, writing descriptions of pictures is not that interesting to me. Finally, out of desperation, I started filtering for jobs that would pay $1 or more and found one that would pay $1 for a short 150-word article:

This was a lot more fun-- I ended up writing an article that had to include the keyword "pirate gear." This turned out to be relatively simple and was relatively fun-- I wrote the article in about 15 minutes. At that rate, compensation would be about $4/hour! Not great, but better.

At any rate, it seems like a fun hobby so far! I'll also include screenshots of how much I've earned along the way so you can have a sense of how much I'm progressing. Here's my first one screenshot:

Happy Turking!