Author: Jeff Barr

I used the Podcast Transcription Store at castingWords.com to create the following transcript of the interview that I did earlier this year with Josh and Chris at the Web 2.0 Show. I spent about 10 minutes adding some links, and I fixed 2 typos in proper names. I will post more about the transcription service […]

The popular TicTap product search tool is now available in XHTML form for mobile devices at http://www.tictap.com/xhtml .

According to Trendwatching.com, a minipreneur is a consumer-turned-entrepreneur, taking advantage of resources that were, just a short time ago, available only to large multinational organizations, including cheap hardware and software, access to global design, production, and manufacturing skills, payment systems, online marketplaces, and more. The Amazon Web Services are one important element of this mix. […]

Over at BitPorters.net, Andrew has released a nice C# class which provides a clean and simple way to access the Mechanical Turk. Andrew’s code implements a TurkController class with clean, simple methods like GetQualificationRequests(), GetQualificationTypes(), ApproveQualification(), GetAccountBalance(), CreateQualification(), CreateHIT(), GetReviewableHITs(), DisposeHIT(), and so forth. It uses the SOAP version of the APIs and handles the […]

The Amazon Associates Team in Japan now has a blog of their own at http://aws.typepad.com/assoc_jp/ .  I don’t read Japanese, but it looks like they are blogging about special deals and promotions, and they are embedding plenty of cover art from books, CDs, and DVDs. — Jeff;

A previous blog posting contained an email address to be used to bring Mechanical Turk issues to our attention. The preferred way to do this is now via the Contact Us page. — Jeff;

The Alexa Web Search Platform is now accepting applications from potential beta testers. The Alexa Web Search Platform allows you to write and run code that runs on a server complex hosted and run by Alexa. To use this service, you write code which calls the Search Platform API. Your code is responsible for processing […]

Amazon’s E-Commerce Service (ECS) is in the running for a Reader’s Choice award from the Web Services Journal in the “Best Web Services Platform” category. To see how we are doing or to cast your vote, please click here.

If you can read and write French and English, today is your lucky day. Bitporters Media is now qualifying Mechanical Turk Workers to handle translation and approval HITS. The former pays 40 cents for up to 512 characters of text; the latter, 30 cents. — Jeff;

Since the beta launch of the Amazon Mechanical Turk last month, members of our developer community have been working hard to encode their HITS (Human Interface Tasks) into the system. One of the first to make it to this point is the Casting Words site (itself still in beta). Casting Words uses the Mechanical Turk […]