Buy my new novel: One Hundred Pages of Zeros

That's right, I am now a published author!

From the writer at Games, Life, and Stuff (http://www.gameslifeandstuff.com) comes his first novel - a swarthy tale of digits and repetition. Each page logically follows the previous in a sequence of virtual tunnel-vision. But don't get complacent... Wait till you read the SHOCK twist ending!

Thanks to the modern miracle of Lulu's print-on-demand technology, anyone can have their material published with no (or very little) upfront fees.

I paid the USD$34.95 fee to get an ISBN number so that bookstores can carry my title. Maybe if I sign a few copies someone will stock it! Also included was a listing in the Books In Print database and placement in Amazon's Marketplace for one year.

On the USD$9.99 cover price $2.78 goes to me, $0.68 commission to Lulu, and the rest is publishing costs.

So go ahead: BUY MY BOOK

Read the full article

Amazon's Mechanical Turk: Earn USD$7/hr to identify pictures

In science fiction and gaming there is a long history of protagonists visiting electronic terminals to accept and perform jobs on demand. Now it can finally happen for real!

Amazon search engine A9 has spent a long time taking pictures of every storefront in select US cities. Why? Well, when you search for a business on A9, you are given a chance to see the actual storefront of the building.

The problem is that tying address data to automated snapshots of GPS co-ordinates is not terribly accurate when performed electronically. Glancing at an image to determine anything useful is practically impossible for computers. But not for people...

Enter the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Now the millions of idle humans online can earn pennies for a few seconds of work that a machine can't do!

For just under an hour, I identified the picture in a series of images that best represented the business name and address given to me. Most often, my choice was "None of the above". The tasks took a few seconds to complete, paying 3 US cents each.

The tasks aren't limited to A9 though. Amazon is providing an API for working with the Mechanical Turk system so that anyone with any task that needs human decisions can benefit. To keep the results accurate there is a rating system for users that gives scores based on their actions. A few of my own tasks were even rejected, possibly where I matched a street address that did not show the actual storefront very well. (This is a big problem with strip malls that have parking lots in front.)

Now, the system is effectively limited to the US at the moment because actual cash payouts go only to US bank accounts. Everyone else can only apply the money earned to Amazon.com purchases.

But when more banking systems are supported, there will be some important questions to consider. Questions like "Why pay Americans 3 cents per task when we can pay Chinese workers half a cent per task?". A Chinese citizen doing illicit gold farming for massive multiplayer games is without a doubt earning less than the USD$7/hr rate I was able to achieve on MT.

For now though, we can earn a few dollars towards a book we want without guilt.

Read the full article