More on Mechanical Turk, CastingWords and CitJ
More on Mechanical Turk, CastingWords and CitJ
Submitted by kpaul.mallasch on Fri, 12/23/2005 - 12:28am.I'm not going to tell you where I was when it really hit me, but for some reason I was thinking about a post (Walking Through the Casting Words Store) by Jeff Barr at the Amazon Web Services Blog. I first read it a few days ago. Tonight, though, instead of thinking about ways to use mTurk for citizen journalism as a requester, I thought about using CastingWords.com to transcribe some of the audio I've been collecting over at Muncie Free Press - specifically, some of the Town Council meetings. At $0.42 per minute it's not that bad of an idea. It's certainly do-able. The only thing I wonder about is the quality of some of my recordings of the Town meetings. Still, even a partial transcript would be very, very useful for people.
I can see a company like CastingWords.com getting really big really quick if news orgs. really start to do more with audio on their websites. (At this point, I want to see newspaper and other sites perfect audio before messing with video.)
I think Amazon is perhaps the smartest player in this so far, though. That is, the newspapers or media companies could band together (like they did with Classified Ventures, Topix.net, etc) and come up with their own transcription factory somewhere or use mTurk themselves.
I don't know. The mixing of apps. and Web 2.0 in general is starting to make things really interesting.
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Well, yeah. Then again, no.
They do see a future, but it's not quite what everyone thinks. They just haven't figured out what it's going to look like past the point of how many fewer people they're going to need to do it.
Remember this, because I'll be pounding it at every opportunity: The main issue in the newspaper business these days is that the economy of scale is flowing away from the print operation. It is getting more, not less expensive to produce print products. So the money is not flowing in that direction. And that's what the major news operation executives are spending their brain cells on. They'll figure something out; don't worry. It may look like what seems to be rising as a trend in journalism these days - or not.
Y'know what? I think I goofed.
I do this every time. The comment above is intended to go with the post titled 'The Future Is Here, But Do News Media Companies See It?'
One day I'll get it right.
no problem
new sites take a while to get used to, but this one should be a lot easier to use than J-Log. ;)