rebecca's pocket

» I recently linked to an item about Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a service which pays people a small amount to perform tasks that are easy for them, but hard for computers. Now, meet Mycroft, a company that plans to distribute microtasks across the Web via banner ads. If I were on the Board of Directors, I would instantly improve the payment scheme by allowing people to apply earned credits toward participating charities. I think this would be a strong incentive for some people who otherwise will quickly lose interest in the whole scheme.

Mycroft, by the way, is named after Sherlock Holmes's mysterious older brother, a "sort of human computer".