“I was a guinea pig for TagCow We figured if this was going to do what it says it’d do, that save us a lot of time tagging our pictures.
In order to use TagCow, you have to register with their site, and upload the pictures to them. You can sign up for their flickr service, which I did, and they are supposed to tag your photo and then upload it to flickr. In order to tag people, you have to upload a picture of that person and assign their name to that picture. I uploaded a picture of me and Clint. Then I uploaded one picture. Several days later, the picture still wasn’t tagged.

One day after I signed up and uploaded my one test picture, it was confirmed that it is actual humans tagging the pictures. I reported to Clint that my picture still wasn’t tagged. A week later, it still wasn’t tagged.

Guess what.. I forgot about it.

Until today. After realizing what the mystery was (”Hey, TagCow finally tagged my picture!”), we realized that it is still not perfect. First of all, why did they change the spaces to underscores in the title? That makes the title stretch all the way across the screen, and I have to actually use the horizontal scroll-bar! Secondly, it tagged Clint in the picture, but Clint isn’t in that picture. Maybe the human thinks Justin looks like the picture of Clint I uploaded? Who knows.

Anyway, I will not be using TagCow in the future. It’s a neat idea, but in practice, they have a long way to go.”

Jerry “hates fucking chinks” Wank

Harry “covering all the angles” Wang

Workers get 5 photos and are paid $.04 to label all the text in the photo and to “Describe, using simple, generic terms, what you see in the image. (Examples: family, beach, drawing, child, child eating spaghetti, letter, disneyland, envelope, greeting card, etc.)”

Tagcow’s response to the increased load has been an offer of a $10 bonus to every 200 hits completed (that’s 1000 photos as each hit has 5 photos).

Be aware since anyone can sign up to mechanical turk, all your photos you want tagged are viewable by the public.