digitalkoot
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Crowdsourcing company introduces the 'game-ification' of dull labor
What might look like a bridge of gibberish to you is more precisely a string of seemingly random Finnish words (so, yeah -- gibberish). See a word and type it. Do so correctly and you'll have constructed a segment of the bridge, leading a parade of moles across a chasm. You repeat the process -- type the word you see -- until construction is complete and your performance is scored. This is Mole Bridge, and it's "valuable work," Ville Miettinen, CEO of creator Microtask, tells VentureBeat. Like other taskmaster companies before it, Microtask, a Finnish startup, is using a crowdsourcing model to distribute mind-numbing, repetitive work across a network of laborers -- actually, volunteers for now. "Pure monetary compensation is a 20th-century concept," Miettinen told The New York Times last October. At the time, he envisioned the "game-ification" of dull clickwork, which could pay players with virtual currency or other rewards valued by gamer culture. It's now a reality. The company's first major project, "Digitalkoot," has some 25,000 volunteers digitizing the archives of the National Library of Finland by playing Mole Bridge and its companion game, Mole Hunt. (See a video of each posted after the break.) So all that gibberish? Uh-huh, it's actually a series of randomly selected images -- in most cases, individual words -- from scanned documents, which character recognition software has been unable to interpret. Our reward for still being smarter than the machines? A high score.
