The image you see here is one of my DVD shelves, It's been rotated to make it easier to read. I always wanted to catalog the DVD collection but we have 10 of these in the house. That's a lot of typing, barcode scanning, or just about anything. Last week I came up with an idea on how to solve this and tonight I pulled it off. With only 30 minutes of my time and $5.50 I got the names of every DVD in my collection.
Yea, under $6 and under an hour. How you ask?
MTurk is a service run by Amazon.com that uses people to do tasks computers are not great at. You can do tasks or post them at the site. In the past I did a few of them for fun. They don't pay much but there are people out there that do it for a living. There are over 58,000 tasks in there system right now. It's a very cool system. The tasks are all over the board from clicking on websites to typing reviews of products. Most tasks pay about $0.05 for a 30 second task.
I went around my house and took photos of each DVD shelf. I filled out the forms for MTurk and got a task template all setup. I put 10 tasks online for people to type the names of every DVD in the picture. I put a $0.50 price on each one. It took less than an hour for all 10 to be done and turned in by the Turkers. I had to reject 3 of the submissions for missing movies but the 2nd attempt on each of those got it right. Now I have a nice spreadsheet I can import into any program that lists all my DVDs. I also added the shelf information to the spreadsheet since I know what Image each typed title came from.
It's just amazing to me how easy it was to outsource a task I wanted done and how cheap it could be done. Next up, my book library and wine cellar.
OK seriously this is amazing. I was looking at my mom's books, yesterday, wondering how the @%(* I would catalogue them. I tried just counting them once, and got bored about halfway through the house, somewhere around three thousand titles. NOW I KNOW. This is an awesome find!
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