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There are a few requesters who use Mturk to generate page views for their websites by asking turkers to link to their site by way of a blog post.
Others just want feedback on their website and refer the link to turkers for their review.
However, I think it is important for requesters to distinguish between the kind of hits that they want.
If they want to generate page views, then their hit should request turkers to link to their site and make a favorable or at least not a negative post. They should not request for a review of the site by way of a blog post. Otherwise, they have no control over the blog posting of the turker. And if the request did not specify that the post should be neutral or positive, then the mere posting of the blog post by the turker would make them liable for payment. They cannot reject the hit because the turker did what was asked of him or her.
On the other hand, if the requester was looking for feedback to improve his site, then the hit should require the turker to submit his comments within the Mturk request window itself, and not through a blog post. Otherwise, the requester may have made the necessary changes to his site, but the outdated review would still be posted on the turker’s site. The turker would not be able to revise the review, unless he or she gets to accept another hit from the same requester requesting for an updated review. Since chance plays a big part in what hits a turker is able to accept at a given time — unless the requester directs the hit to a particular turker directly — then it’s possible that the requester will never be able to accept a similar hit from the same requester.
To sum up:
Pageviews — request for a favorable or neutral blog post. However, if the product or page is really not worthy, turkers may give their real opinion about it on their blog, regardless of the payment. And really, for $0.01, you can’t expect glowing reviews.
Reviews — request for the review to be posted within the Mturk hit itself, not in a blog post.
It’s hard, okay? Mturk pays in trickles. After a year, I haven’t even reached 1/10th of my goal. $12.121. Pathetic. And what’s that $0.001 tacked on at the end there? Did a requester really pay me a fraction of a cent?
And then there are all those DVDs that I bought that frittered away my travel money. Fine, I may have a copy of the Sweeney Todd deluxe version now, and the first three seasons of Quite Interesting but do I watch them nonstop? No, I don’t because by the time I got them, my fan love has waned and I had moved on to other fandoms. Makes for a waste of money, I guess. I should have just save my Mturk cents for my Metrocard.
And now I have a new goal, which is Paris. Ha! Let’s see how far turking will get me this time.
The only nice thing about today is the news that Terry Pratchett will soon be SIR Terry Pratchett. He says he’s flabergasted, but we his fans are pleased for him.
Winter turns to thoughs of warmth and what could be warmer than a soft furry cat nuzzling against you in bed? It’s a good thing my tabby Peaches is trained to wee in her special corner before getting in bed with me. I remember an old orange tom I used to have. It’s favorite spot was on top of the television, and one really cold night, he really let himself go. On top of the television. Lazy cat. I wish I had known about the website Your Special Cat then. I could have taken advantage of some of the tips about cat urine removal. Boy, there are quite a few articles about urine there. As well as cat vomit, cat colds, and hairball. No Lolcats, this site. It’s filled with practical advice.
I’ll say this, the links and products are interesting, and now that I know that there’s such a thing as personalized cat checks, I’m tempted to get a set to use when I buy Peaches’s special needs. But probably not when I buy stocks or pay for my mortgage, though. Mweh.
The website confused me, though. It didn’t have a clear header so you don’t really know the title of the blog, unless from the URL. The sidebar containing links have a pink on violet motif, which makes them hard to read. I’m also bothered by the off-center alignment of the cat photos: are they really supposed to be right-aligned? There’s so much empty wasted space beside the photo, and it’s right in the middle of my field of vision. Perhaps it’s just Firefox; perhaps it’s just me.
There’s a new site that purports “to find the best blog post of each day” which I discovered through Mturk. It calls itself Yearblook, an unfortunate name which brings to mind words like “sludge” and “slime” and “icky things that you better not step on, otherwise you’ll find yourself dragged down to the bottom.”
It’s another one of those vote-driven sites where readers can vote on submitted posts. No registration required, so I don’t know how they will handle the multiple clicks generated by a user on a proxy server. (Well, they probably got that covered. I tried voting twice on a post just to see if I can and the site wouldn’t let me. Besides, according to their site, they use a “secret algorithm.” )
Still, Yearblook seems a lot like Digg, the difference being that it intends to publish the collection after a year.
To which I am necessarily skeptical. Publication works for PostSecret because it’s very visual and not all postcards are housed on the site. The book is often the only record and it makes for a good coffee table book.
But the best and most revealing personal blog posts are those that are usually flocked and they are flocked for a reason: because the blogger wants to share only with a limited few.
On the other hand, if it isn’t a personal post, then it’s probably available on the internets somewhere. I already keep track of the blogs I want to read, and the posts I want to remember using delicious and Google reader and other blog aggregators. Do I necessarily want a capsule of last year to take up precious space on my limited shelves? Meh. Last year is already on the internets. I can just pull down the site or its cached file without having to get my hands dusty.
Besides, think of the trees that will have to give up their lives for this project. Is it worth killing them for this?
I do miss some lost posts though. The old snarky Television Without Pity (TWOP) reviews, for one thing, before they went all corporate and lost their bite. But I find that my daily reading is too full now to lost sleep over lost posts. There’s always something new up at Gawker and it’s not like I’ve gone through all of Slate yet. Which brings us to another issue: your blogosphere may vary. Your best posts may not be my best posts.
So my prediction for Yearblook: they will end up like my high school yearbook. People posed for studio shots but the kids in charge of putting the yearbook together graduated or moved on or lost in touch with each other or stained the photos with ink and the yearbook just never got published. But that’s okay because we had already moved on.
Went off the grid for a while because I went to . . . Bangkok!
Went to see the temples of Ayutthaya
met Buddha
Bought fruits at the floating market
Watched a snake charmer work his magic
And saw elephants.
Apparently, I forgot to take pictures of all the Thai food and shopping places but I did a lot of that too. 
Today, I discovered Muxtape and Mixwit, two sites where you can create and share your mixed tapes. Mixwit has a more nostalgic feel to its design: creators can dress up their own cassette tape whose rollers turn realistically as the music plays. Aside from the play and pause and jump forward and back buttons, there is also a tracking button for easy refrain replays. Muxtape only features a list of the songs contained in the mixed tape in aggressively 60 font and a countdown. The Muxtape homepage is also off-putting, what with its discordant radio buttons in clashing colors.
Both websites suffer from a failure to give listeners an idea of the theme of the mixed tape. It would be nice to have an idea of what I’m listening to but it’s impossible. Other than the user names and vague and extremely personal mixed tape titles, it’s almost like Russian roulette. And there is nothing more disappointing than a mixed tape that does not have a sense of narrative.
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