Amazon's version of the Mechanical Turk is a service which distributes human judgment problems to the crowd. Dolores Labs is a new enterprise which plans to make managing, collecting, interpreting and leveraging distributable judgment problems and their answers. One can get a good idea of what they do, and for whom, from their examples page, which includes: sentiment analysis, search relevance and classification tasks.
One of the nicest illustrations of the problem space is the labeling of colours. A full description appears on their blog, which includes a pointer to their released data set.
The color explorer, http://assets.doloreslabs.com/jobs/colors/explorer/, is very cool. It is interesting to simply do a select on the colors in the webpage with your mouse and see what else gets selected as you move your mouse around - clearly the html is output in some order relative to the original data set. While this is an unintended side-effect, it implies some interesting UI that could be intentionally created around this type of data.
Posted by: Dave | March 23, 2008 at 11:54 PM
This is pretty cool. Wonder if it can be applied to mobile devices and administrative work. A cloud of remote temps would be a cool use.
Posted by: Javier | March 27, 2008 at 05:15 PM