ReadWriteWeb

A recent report found that up to 40% of new work requests on Amazon's Mechanical Turk are spam. It's not the first time that there have been reports that the marketplace for micro-tasks has been used to employ folks for spam or fraud, or to prank friends or game The New York Times Most Emailed list.

But as ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick has often argued, there are some very interesting things you can do with Mechanical Turk. And Lindsey Harper, founder of Swayable, has found that the service has benefited her greatly as she's developed and tested several components of her web app.

What if you were given incredible powers but had such a limited imagination that you only used them to pollute the internet with spam? That's what's happening to the powerful distributed labor marketplace of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where requesters pay small sums of money for people around the world to perform small tasks that only a human can do. You can use Mechanical Turk to do incredible things - but it turns out that most people don't. Many just use it to hire an army of spammers.

A new study by NYU academics Professor Panos Ipeirotis, Dahn Tamir and Priya Kanth studied all the new Mechanical Turk requester accounts that have been created over the last two months and found that more than 40% of their requests were for the workers to commit acts of spam. The team used Mechanical Turk itself to evaluate the tasks submitted, but they had to take extra steps after their own requests for work came back filled with spammy, random input from workers who didn't care. The whole situation is a tragic loss of opportunity - because there are some really fantastic things you can use this service for.

I suffer from severe data envy when it comes to LinkedIn. They have detailed information on millions of people who are motivated to keep their profiles up-to-date, collect a rich network of connections and have a strong desire from their users for more tools to help them in their professional lives. Over the past couple of years Chief Scientist DJ Patil has put together an impressive team of data scientists to deliver new services based around all that information.

One of my favorites is their career explorer, using the accumulated employment histories of millions of professionals to help students understand where their academic and early job choices might lead them.

ReadWriteWeb Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick recently extolled the virtues of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for "rocking conference blogging." He's not the only person who's seeing some real benefits from outsourcing small tasks to the service, as I've noticed a number of people talk about the ways in which they use - or could envision using - Mechanical Turk to help them. Ewan McIntosh, for example, wonders if teachers could utilize the service to outsource some of the "larger scale time suckers" in education -- entering attendance records, generating letters to parents, and so on.

Let's say you are going to, or hosting, a conference and you want to make a good impression with the attendees and organizers. One way to do that is to create useful and thoughtful original content and resources regarding the event.

Thanks to tools like Mechanical Turk, Google Custom Search and of course Twitter, you can now do incredible things around conferences that would have been very inefficient to do before.

Crowdsourcing may be stretching the geo-political landscape much the same way that cloud computing is redefining the data center. In short, nothing is safe and yet everything has the promise of being better.

Companies, industries, and economies are forming in the cloud by taking on these tasks and participating in the ecosystem across the world. For the last several years, Amazon has been leading the way in defining this market with Mechanical Turk. Today, when we checked, there are 75,000 HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) waiting to be collected on.

It looks like the startup trends of 2009 are getting the resources they need to become lucrative businesses in 2010. Labor on demand provider Crowdflower closed a $5 million dollar Series A this morning from Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. ReadWriteWeb named the elastic workforce phenomenon a major trend in 2009 and we caught up with one of Crowdflower's happy customers to see how the elastic workforce is helping startups thrive.

Why didn't we think of this? Project management startup Smartsheet released a new core feature this week - integration of Amazon's outsourcing service Mechanical Turk. The Smartsheet interface will now let you set up Turk research jobs that thousands of anonymous workers around the world will split up and perform quickly for a very low price.

In the example the company provides on its product page, the user publishes a series of small work orders for research on the names and profiles of top CEOs around the country. That kind of drudgery would take hours to perform, but with Mechanical Turk it can be done on the cheap, quickly.

The Digiteen Dream Team, a group of passionate ninth graders who have been using Google's Lively as part of the Digiteen Project, are planning to protest this Wednesday against Google's decision to close down its virtual world environment, Lively, at the end of this year.

In their shutdown announcement, Google suggested Lively users capture their work by taking videos and screenshots, and thanked their users adding: "We've learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments." Is this all Lively was about? An experiment in user behavior?