
MTurk + Google News API = press - langoff
http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/09/24/google-news-api-mturk-press/#
======
tomgruner
Mechanical turk is abusive. It bypasses the laws that were designed to protect
the most vulnerable, and it will take some time for new laws to catch up that
can regulate operations like mechanical turk. Just because new services and
start ups have out maneuvered the law making system does not make those
services ethical.

"Workers relying on such low wages and unstable employment are not likely to
be able to educate their children enough to escape increasingly high rates of
unemployment. A sustainable form of crowdsourcing will require forms of
collective governance that mitigate the effects of market competition on those
treated as mere links in a chain of algorithmic logic."

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/the-
unregulated...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/the-unregulated-
work-of-mechanical-turk/)

Workers will do jobs for as little as 25 cents an hour.
[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/22/americans-w...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/22/americans-
will-work-for-25-cents-an-hour.html)

According to the nytimes article, 70% of the workers are women. For me, the
possibility of paying an american woman 25 cents an hour so that I can get
some press coverage is disgusting. When we needed data entry done, we hired
some of our out of work friends for about $12-$15 per hour. It served our
needs just fine and cost us about $1500 total.

For fast turn arounds, I see why you would want mechanical turk, but planning
ahead can give you the possibility of treating people ethically. I don't agree
with any systems that perpetuate poverty. Mechanical Turk obviously provides a
very valuable service to businesses however. Does anyone know if there any
systems like mechanical turk that guarantee at least minimum wage is being
paid to the workers?

~~~
robrenaud
It's not as though Amazon is going and pointing a gun at people's heads and
telling them to Turk or die.

If it's a bad trade for people to exchange their time for the low wage, they
shouldn't take it.

~~~
tomgruner
Rob, as a software engineer at google, I would not expect you to to be able to
relate to those without opportunities. In fact, there is some evidence that
utilizing your brain to solve technical problems can restrict its ability to
empathize. Of course amazon has no gun, but that does not mean that poverty in
itself is not violent. As you like science and data, here is a read for you:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.htm)

~~~
bcoates
Perhaps he's empathic enough to realize what it's like to have few choices,
then have a well-meaning but paternalistic social reformer swoop in and take
some of those choices away, pat you on the head, and drive off back to his
nice neighborhood.

~~~
Dylan16807
There's another way of thinking about it, that involves no paternalistic
behavior. The government forces you to put an accurate price on transactions.
For example, say you have a year-old good-condition car. As I understand it,
you can sell it for around what it's worth, considering circumstances, or you
can give it away, but you can't sell it for $50.

------
caublestone
Sounds like you have found a potential product.

~~~
austenallred
Seriously, I'd pay to use that if it were pretty cheap.

------
austenallred
I've mentioned before that I would pay to use this product.

If you had the same tool that worked with a blog search API not only would I
pay for it, but you could sell it to SEOs all day long. Just need to find a
decent blog search API; I haven't had much luck.

~~~
nerfhammer
If someone here were to market this product, do you have any suggestions as to
how they could reach other customers as well, enough to make it a sustainable
business?

~~~
austenallred
Your target would be SEO. Warriorforum.com, blackhatworld.com, #Seochat, etc.

------
Humbled
Did any of those 300 emails bounce. I.E., how many weren't correct?

Edit: Not yet tried mTurk so just curious how legitimacy and payments are
handled.

~~~
justinwi
Good question. Overall quality was high (you're able to see the results as
they come in and if they look funky, you can reject them and you won't have to
pay).

Stats on our campaign are here:
[http://screencast.com/t/5XizDvsvjP](http://screencast.com/t/5XizDvsvjP)

------
seeingfurther
Already have an MTurk batch running with 2,250 articles. This is amazing...
Thanks!

I set my price at $.05 but only using masters.

Did you use masters?

Did you set multiple assignments per hit or 1 was enough per article?

~~~
justinwi
I didn't use masters for mine because it was easy enough for me to look at the
email addresses that were coming in and see if they were junk.

Would be curious to find out if masters will work for $.05. Please keep me
posted! :)

~~~
seeingfurther
In 2 hours I had 2 HITs completed by masters. Probably going to need to switch
to regular workers and closely monitor like you did.

~~~
Chupachupski
One approach is to get each hit done by two (or three) regular MTurkers and
crosscheck the results. I've seen this done with "human OCR" type tasks.

------
seeingfurther
Are email addresses for the reporters on every article? I'd be interested to
know what the stats are.

~~~
justinwi
There are rarely email addresses on a particular article, it's usually a
matter of tracking down the author and finding his/her email address.

We ended up getting addresses for about half of the article authors.

~~~
seeingfurther
So the the Mturk worker would check the article for the email, if it's listed
great, if not they might Google it?

~~~
eterm
And all for $0.03

Does that make anyone else feel a bit ick at mTurk?

~~~
jimueller
Agreed. Surely the ~350 email addresses (although stated about 1/2 were valid)
were worth much more than $10. In my opinion, it's unethical.

~~~
justinwi
Comments welcome here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483636)

------
knockonthedoor
"The Google News Search API has been officially deprecated as of May 26,
2011."

~~~
justinwi
True, but deprecated != dead.

API still works great. You can try it yourself:
[http://press.CustomerDevLabs.com](http://press.CustomerDevLabs.com)

------
matthewbaker
Productize this! I'll pay you today for an easy to use service.

I am absolutely going to give this a shot for our next product release. I love
that it simplifies the connection to relevant journalists. It's truly a win-
win.

Thank you for sharing!

------
mmaia
Really nice!

That's pretty much the process I used to launch some apps -- except that I
like to get the contacts myself and read some other articles from the person,
so I can add a personal touch to the emails (it will increase your chances
with the top journalists).

After successfully using this method, I'm building
[http://get.press.io](http://get.press.io)

------
prostoalex
Your advice says to enforce embargoes, but the screenshot shows a reporter
publishing news early.

Did you not enforce it, and this is a "lesson learned"?

Otherwise, how would a new service know which reporters honor embargoes and
which ones don't?

~~~
mbrameld
The caption for that photo says, "We didn’t include an embargo, but we should
have…"

------
bledsoestrat
Definitely should be it's own product. Only snag I found was for double byte
characters. Can anyone give me a hand with getting the titles and desc's to
pull in properly if the language is in double bytes?

------
randall
Great hack! Very impressed.

~~~
eric_cc
Came here to say the same. Thanks for sharing.

------
PanMan
The link to the resulting press (in the article) is broken. It's
[http://bitly.com/bundles/justinwi/1](http://bitly.com/bundles/justinwi/1)

~~~
justinwi
Thanks for the heads up! Fixed.

------
mzs
"The more we can help them out by writing our story for them, the better of
(sic) we’ll both be."

I get that, but it sort of depresses me still.

~~~
justinwi
What part depresses you? That we need to do the write up for reporters?

(fixed the typo...thanks!)

~~~
mzs
That they are so busy that so often they rehash press releases, that's all.
Anyway, it's neat what you did.

------
betadreamer
the script works great! its very hard to find the email address though. I
can't believe people actually dig this for just 3 cents.

------
dusker
How did you guys send emails? SaaS? Your own thing, if so then how did you
make sure you didn't end up in 'spam box'?

~~~
justinwi
Mailchimp. Didn't appear to have a problem with spam - each article was
personalized, and included an unsubscribe link.

Could have made it into some folk's spam folders though. No data on that.

~~~
dusker
good to know, thanks bro

------
markhall
Awesome hack! Brilliant strategy and execution. I'll definitely use this for
projects. Thanks for sharing!!!

------
alopes
Does MTurk work outside the US?

~~~
mahranch
It used too, but they've had a lot of problems. Apparently there were a lot of
scammers from India so they (temporarily?) ceased allowing new accounts from
outside the US.

------
beNjiox
Great! You are my Hero

------
jamesjyu
Very awesome hack.

