Long time ago, I published a post in which I described microtasking. This is a well delimited crowdsourcing type and offers no doubts about its operation: someone asks performing a task that is impossible or difficult to perform correctly for software giving an economic reward.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a classic. It is the quintessential microtasking platform. Here in Spain it seems that this kind of market does not raise its head. There have been several attempts, such as Coocult platform, which is no longer online, or Microlabora platform, that although it’s still online it has no activity.
Since Amazon Mechanical Turk can not be used in Spain, because to be a requester you need a U.S. billing address, I think in three reasons that explains the inexistence of working microtasking platforms in Spain: 1) the platforms don’t survive enough time to reach the enoguh crowd to operate autonomously, 2) we are talking about an unknown model or (related to the latter) the whole range of tasks that can be requested is not known.
Actually, any work sufficiently modulable that does not involve the use of sensitive information, could be done through microtasking (crowdsourcing). Regardless, to give us an idea of what can be done, here I post a list of tasks that today are offered in various international microtasking platforms:
- Tagging images
- Tagging parts of images such as faces, clothing, etc.
- Image Conversion
- Image optimization
- Cleaning database
- Transcripts
- Translations
- Rate translations between languages
- Document digitalization (i.e.: introduce the text from business cards into a web form)
- File Conversion
- Content moderation
- Verification of content
- Content search (i.e.: finding the email from a series of contacts)
- Content categorization (i.e.: choosing the best category for an element)
- Content creation
- Data Collection
- Classification of feeling
- Relevance ranking
- Quality classification
- Sort geographically blog