Mechanical Turk takes apart Girl Talk

Roman posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 | Uncategorized

Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is brilliant. It works solely as a finely cut gem of pure enjoyment, but it is also a pop art puzzle. It’s the puzzle aspect that Andy Baio decided to take a HIT out on. This post describes how he got all the Billboard chart data for the 264 sampled songs on the album by paying $0.02 for every verified answer using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. To say the least, the crowd sourcing worked, “Within an hour, all but 4 answers were submitted. The median time to finish a request was an impressive 26 seconds”

Here’s some of the resulting data, mapped out all pretty.