A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done.
Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image:
After two days, the image was finally tagged with two words: “Pool” , “Man”. I guess that is what you get for free. Furthermore, when I downloaded the image, I could not find the keywords anymore…There is nothing automated about this service. It is currently impossible for a computer to recognize the content of an image. The most advanced systems I have seen have a 10% success rate, and then again with very contrasted and simple pictures. Tagcow uses a little known service offered by Amazon call the Mechanical Turk. With this service, anyone can put a long, painful task and offer to pay for human beings to fulfill them
“Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it”. At 0.01 cent a picture, one can get images keyworded for cheap. However, the quality is not guaranteed.
Thus it is the power of the masses used here, making more obvious why they picked a cow for their name. Not the brightest animal in the land
I guess you would have saved much more time keywording “man” and “pool” yourself than uploading it there.
But are you sure the people who do this get paif 0.01 CENT per picture? Or 0.01 Euro? Or Dollar?
Indeed yes. It is most certainly dollars and no, I am not absolutely sure what they are paying. All I know is that it is free to use it so they cannot be paying much.