New service TagCow caused a bit of a stir over the weekend. The product seemingly solves the problem of auto-categorization and tagging of photos, something that seems to still be beyond the processing power and software skills of most startups.
Users upload photos - thousands of them if they like - and within a few minutes the photos are returned with stunningly accurate descriptive keywords that facilitate searching and browsing later on. The product worked so well, and the site had so little description of the technology behind it, that I speculated that humans were doing the work in the background.
And….I was right. A reader sent in a tip that they saw the service on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, which is a web service that gets people to do things that are fairly hard for computers to do. TagCow is actually a perfect fit for Mechanical Turk.
Users are paid 4 cents to properly tag a group of five photos. I tagged a few photos with “TechCrunch” twenty times each, collected my 4 cents, and moved on. My guess is it would take about two minutes to properly tag the five photos. That means if you work steady and without breaks, you can make $1.20/hour. More if you are speedier.
I’m not sure this will make me rich…I guess if you are REALLY persistent it will…in time..
Still you have to be pretty ambitious.
In a few hours someone will probably make a script that will do this for you.
I think that’s actually 28 times each…gosh Mike.
Money is money! If you have some free time, why not?
i wonder if any of the guys in that photo read techcrunch.
If I have free time I will think of a new project idea to take over da world !!
@ John: because time is more valuable than money? 1 hour is more valuable than $1.20 surely… guess there’s no minimum wage huh
@Michael
I’m sure yes, some of them look nerdy.
If you have free time and want to make some extra cash, why not use a site like CashCrate and fill out surveys, the will definitely pay better than this and you can make a lot more money with it.
I tried a few. I tagged all images group sex, orgy, fellatio, swingers, voyeur etc. They were some guy’s Christmas photos
TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch,
TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechCrunch,
how does it feel?
well maybe they try to capture the east-european and chinese market
$1.20/hr????? Great wage in China maybe.
How does this business scale? What if a bot creates 1000 free accounts and uploads 5000 photos each at a cost of $40000 to tagcow?
It’s kinda like Google Image Tagger, only you are getting paid. If there are people who play that just for points, why not get paid for it (even if it is just a very small amount).
here in india that is a fabulous wage, think i will sign up
I dont want to be rich
globalization 2.0 - this cruel application kindly supports child labour in india. how cool is that?
Michael,
that is exactly google why used the ESP game for photo tagging. Untill 2 unrelated users input the same tag its not a tag. Otherwise spam and mislabeled data is an insurmountable fence which tagcow will never be able to scale. Even if tagcow puts an ESP game, if you offer to share the profit with your readers, you can all blurt out “techcrunch techcrunch …..” and chase this cow to the deadpool. We humans are still powerful enough to beat the algo.
well, this was obviously going to happen:
who the hell is going pay to have their photos tagged?
Good side is there is no shortage of work if you are into mechanical turk. just create an account and upload some images. Then go back to AMT to do the hits
Tagging photos could be a great use case of massive crowd sourcing which is really promising. AI (Artificial Intelligence) still has a long way to go before it can be used in massive products. In this case massive crowd sourcing is the only way to do time consuming jobs that machine can not do.
By the way, $1.2/h may not be so attractive for some areas in China. As far as I know, the latest lowest hourly rate in Shanghai is 8 RMB which is $1.1392.
Cangelor - sure, but I’m betting those people in China willing to work for $1.20 per hour don’t speak good enough english to tag these photos.
You’d be surprised at just how many Chinese have Engish passable enough to label a teacup, a mountain, a dog or a hat. Probaby in the tens of millions. And in the Philipines, Nigeria and India where combined there are more Engish speaking people than the US, this would be a great source of income
Tag photos for money? As an old Google program..
$1.20/hour, just wondering who have time to do that?
Good job
earning more and more
i have also tried and earn some money
is this a late April Fool’s joke?
This must be a late April Fool’s joke. What relevance would the tags have? I don’t think that these people tagging would know that a picture depicts e.g. the Louvre in Paris or such. I have no interest knowing the fact that there is a pigeon taking a shit on it or something like that.
government benefits pay better :p
There are many people in Eastern Europe with good enough English that would find the $1.2 / hour quite attractive.
It is amazing how many people simply didn’t read the entire article (too eager to comment with their crappy blog), or don’t possess comprehension skills beyond the 3rd grade level (eg. like saying they will upload photos to AMT).
There should be a merit-based comment system (non-mandatory), that gives those commenters special differentiation (similar to author comments).
Meh, the Google Image Labeller is more clever. Why pay 1.20/hr when you can make it just a LITTLE competative and have people do it for free!
Heck, I’ve “played” that game when I’m brain-fried on a Friday afternoon before… and look at the number of points the leader board rack up.
So it’s OK for you to spam others but not for others to spam you ?
Good to know …..
Obviously, they probably plan to up both their price (currently free) and their pay once the model has proven itself. This is just a simple way to test the market.
I would pay to have photos tagged. It can be very time consuming.
At flickr you do this for free, and gladly
Why don’t these guys come up with a genius method of tapping into the free labour like flickr has? 4cents is still too much to pay when it could be gotten for free!
Nothing wrong with that…
tagging took forever and was awful; person recognition didn’t work at all; and then what? you can’t edit or add your own tags; no way they’re going near my Flickr account
yeah it seemed pretty obvious mechanical turk was behind it. i commented that i thought that was it as well.
at a traditional stock agency i believe they pay a keyworder around 5-8 cents per image keyworded, which is twice this place so who knows there could be a little arb oppty here. hahaha. also a good keyworder though is more than just someone babbling on and adding words off the top of their head. they have to think about a lot of things and esp what someone would type into a search query. I wrote about that.
http://cutcaster.blogspot.com/.....rding.html
Id say this would be a decent service for a photo licensing agency to use which was starting up.
I’ve heard of keyworders being paid upwards of 350 bucks a day and probably more if they are really good..
Hmm… TagCow’s bonus program seems good, but they are little possibilities
to make any money out if it, you could always fake the tags to achieve more
hits though.
And $1.20/h, man, at 30 I can get this bike I always dreamed of for going to work… lol!
FYI subvertandprofit.com gives $2.0 for every time they require you to digg news postings.
In case you need to sign up.
http://subvertandprofit.com/us.....rer=ixn321.
Unfortunately, the only real way of tagging images or large bodies of information and data in a meaningful way with high precision is still by human intervention. Perhaps visual recognition technology will not be far away, which will automate this process, eventually pulling keywords and tags with high accuracy rates from images and videos.
The ESP/Google method is a good one but as one stated, it could be gamed too - especially if money is involved.
Leaderboards are always a good incentive. I can see many leaderboards for such an endeavor (i.e. most pics tagged, most tags, most verified tags, most verifications, quickest tagger, most accurate tagger based on verification process, etc.).
They could also implement a second pass (or more) double-blind tagging process to try and reduce the spam and mis-tags. This could even be done by “trusted” taggers (maybe even in-house employees). The second pass can be conducted alot more efficiently per image so theoretically they could pay a few folks in-house decent money to ensure quality tags.
They would also probably want to flag images as “complete” or “adequate” after the second pass (or third depending on how they setup the verification scheme).
It sounds like they are release the raw Turk results which is definately a no-no. VERY surprised they did that (if it was not by accident or a one-off situation).
Harry “interesting tagcow, intersting ” Wang
Sheesh
When I said “It sounds like they are release the raw Turk results which is definately a no-no.”
I meant:
It sounds like they are releasing the raw Turk results which is definately a no-no.
Harry “you cannot understand the words coming out of my fingers” Wang
Just wait untill someone publishes a Auto-Hotkey script to auto-tag pics.
If I wanted to get in this niche I’d make people tag pictures for free.
The service would use a system similar to reCAPTCHA, but using pictures instead of words.
PS: This comment will serve as evidence to sue anyone who uses that idea in the future.
As many pointed out, $1.2/hr is well enough for many in developing countries for a day living. Globalization 2.0 is a good term to describe. You can easily have a very high moral stance by blaming such activities encourage child labor, however, before there are efficient mechanisms to feed these poor children, such moral stance won’t save these children.
Another subject.
Current business model of tagcow is obviously not viable, however, sooner or later tagcow will charge the customers after current marketing promotion and before the VC money burn out. I think people in western countries won’t mind paying a few dollars to get someone in the world to do the dirty work. Rich people may improve family life, and poor people in other parts of the world get food in the stomach.
If a known card counter walks into a casino from Vegas to Monaco an alarm goes off in security in seconds. Surely this decade old technology could be used to recognize a mountain or a dog for tagging?