Today's podcast, the fifth in my Friday podcast series, is a conversation with Nathan McFarland and Benjamin Hill. I met Nathan at ETech, where he demonstrated CastingWords, a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to distribute and coordinate work. Benjamin's project, Mycroft, packages up puzzle-like tasks in ways that people can interact with on web pages. You can find a write-up on Mycroft in this CommerceNet technical report.
Tim O'Reilly's favorite Web 2.0 tagline is harnessing collective intelligence, and these are two leading examples of that idea. I thought it would be fun to invite Nathan and Benjamin to compare notes, and indeed it was. Nobody knows what the social and economic ramifications of these systems will be, but we're about to start finding out.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/05.html#a1443