Tagging for Peanuts

Students graduating in the next few months may be struggling to find a job. If nothing else turns up, they can earn money without having to leave home. A new photo tagging service will pay them to properly tag photos. The folks at Tech Crunch claim TagCow “solves the problem of auto-categorization and tagging of photos.”

Here’s how it works. Users upload their photos. Then, minutes later, users get their pics back with accurate keywords to help them browse and search their catalogues. Tech Crunch claims the product works so well that they have trouble believing people do the tagging.

People still outperform computers on a wealth of tasks. Amazon exploits that fact with its Mechanical Turk service. Users perform Human Intelligence Tasks or Hits, “simple tasks that people do better than computers.” And, they get paid for it.

One caveat: you won’t make as much money on these sites as you would doing consulting work or banking. TagCow pays people four cents to tag five photos, which takes a couple of minutes. At that rate, you would earn less than a buck fifty an hour. So you may want to keep on looking.