Work and employment on the Net, part 1

Sorry for the delay in responding to your questions in class last week… as far as contract/freelance work goes, I really can only find computer-related sites. These jobs can range from designing logos to fixing a webpage to programming an application. A site that presents well is http://www.freelanceworkexchange.com.

Another question was about learning how to work with online APIs like Google Maps. A good starting place is http://maps.google.com/apis/maps/.

Finally, if anyone has questions or would like advice, you can contact me at benbakelaar at gmail dot com!

Telecommuting, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and cybercities

Everyone who was around in the ’90s probably remembers the media promises of a revolution in work, where within 10 years people would be able to telecommute from their homes to work. As we know, that vision has been somewhat delayed – many office workers now have a “virtual” office that follows them around, through VPN’s, laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and corporate VoIP systems, but it’s not the same as working 5 days a week from home.

One of the earlier posts references the “Web 3.0″ blog by AndroidTech, and in it there is a future scenario where a worker is telecommuting, in Minority Report style. While we aren’t there yet, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk takes the world one step closer. By creating a protocol-based system that utilizes human intelligence to complete pattern recognition and other tasks not completable by a computer program, it allows for the beginnings of a cyber-economy where offshoring, inshoring, and outsourcing no longer matter – the workers can come from anywhere with a decent connection.

The first media example I’ve seen of a demonstrated use of the system is here, in an article detailing the high-tech search for missing Microsoft researcher James Gray.

News.com: Silicon Valley’s high-tech hunt for colleague

In particulare, note this paragraph:

Once the satellite’s images were received by imaging experts on Thursday, Digital Globe engineers worked on making them accessible to engineers at Amazon, who divided them into manageable sizes and posted them to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, which allows the general public to scrutinize images in search of various objects.

“This is a first sift through these images,” said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, who had Gray on his Ph.D. committee at Vrije University in Amsterdam. “If the volunteers see something, we ask them to please mark the image, and we’ll take all the images that have been marked and review them.”