2010 - clickworker.com

Recently, we launched the new project “Travel Data Research”. The Clickworker’s task was to research comparable prices for specific travel dates and for a given destination.

Every Clickworker participating in this project could win one of the following cash prizes if they completed at least one job on 5 consecutive days.

Every clickworker has undoubtedly noticed the countdown clock in the black information bar that starts counting down at the start of (almost) every job. However, many of you might not know why there are these time limits and what role they play for the individual jobs.

During the last weekend in October CommunityCamp will again be held in Berlin. This themed BarCamp will bring together community managers as well as others interested in this and related topics for an open exchange.

Newly minted Clickworkers are asked right upon registration to enter information into their profile; information such as their language abilities and interests. Of course anyone can go back and fill this information in at a later time but it is important not to completely forget to do it and leave this information blank. Why not? Qualification tests and jobs are offered based upon the data found in the Clickworker’s profile.

clickworker.com pays their Clickworkers always and only on the 7th of every month. Should the 7th fall on a weekend or legal holiday in Germany or the United States then payment will occur on the first workday after the 7th. There is a technical reason for this payment schedule, and that is because tasks can be rejected up to seven days after their completion. After this waiting period a completed task is automatically considered accepted and the Clickworker can have the agreed amount credited to their account in payment for their work.

Clickworkers find 1,550 radical right wing websites and web 2.0 entries—analysis on netz-gegen-nazis.de

In the forums their name might be “NSDAP88”, they listen to “Heimattreu (Homeland-loyal radio) Radio” and browse special dating websites to find a romantic partner who shares their radical views. Members of the radical right are very active on the internet and the size and speed of this medium often makes it difficult to monitor the activities of the radical right and to know how to actively stand up against them.

When a neo-Nazis wants to learn more about how to interpret Adolf Hitler’s book: “Mein Kampf”, or if they are looking to meet a romantic partner but want to find someone who shares their extreme right wing views, like everyone else, they simply look on the internet.

There is a growing infrastructure that caters to neo-Nazis and all aspects of the neo-Nazi lifestyle on the Internet. As a Clickworker, lead research campaign shows, this infrastructure isn’t even the main problem. Racist and anti-Semitic content can be found on non-radical right wing internet sites.

more… (in German)

The headquarters of Clickworker may look small. That’s because the majority of its workforce doesn’t work out of the Pittsford office. “We have internet workers – more than 25,000 in the U.S.,” said David Moufarrege of Clickworker. “(They) take on small projects at a time and process them.” What makes this company unique isn’t the thousands of part-time workers it has hired in the last five months. It’s who’s funding the hiring push – German investors.

When many people think of crowdsourcing they often think of the look-and-click tasks that were some of the first documented examples of crowdsourcing in the 1990’s. For example, between November 2000 and September 2001, volunteer clickworkers helped NASA identify craters in photos from Mars. And in 2007 Michael Jackson’s white glove in the video of “Billie Jean” was marked by clickworkers 125,000 times in 72 hours during the White Glove Tracking project.

Over the past years, Google/YouTube supported several creative crowdsourcing projects in cooperation with well-known artists like the YouTube Symphony Orchestra with composer Tan Dun in 2008/09. The current project is a documentary in cooperation with director Ridley Scott.