Amazon Opens Mechanical Turk Crowdsourcing for Non-Coders

Amazon Opens Mechanical Turk Crowdsourcing for Non-Coders: "Amazon Web Services offers a Web-based editing tool for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for non-programmers to create tasks for others to work on together. Even as Turk is fading, businesses are leveraging Amazon's EC2, S3 and other cloud computing tools to give developers platforms to launch Web-based apps. This has spawned a nation of startups, including Bungee Labs, Etelos and Coghead.

Amazon Web Services, the Amazon.com unit that popularized Internet-based computing with its (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Service) services, is making its application development marketplace available to non-programmers.

Today, business users with no coding skills can use a new Web-based editor in Mechanical Turk, the popular site that lets users create a task online and turn it over to someone else to complete.

Before today, businesses with no programmers (or at least none to spare on things like Mechanical Turk) had to manually enter and retrieve each HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), if they even could use Mechanical Turk at all.

HITS include such chores as identifying objects in a photo, transcribing audio recordings, or just researching some data. AWS views HITS as examples of artificial, artificial intelligence, because they let humans do work that co"