JC, I can't see the video on the blog, but works on the Screencast. Maybe it didn't embed right? - Jim Hardy

@Jim - thanks - it should work now - Jean-Claude Bradley

Very cool! And in hindsight, transcribing tabular data is an excellent use of Mechanical Turk. - Rajarshi Guha

/me wonders if this works for extracting NMR data from primary literature too... but given JCs experience... I guess that would require too much insight too... - Egon Willighagen

@Rajarshi - Mechanical Turk also has an API - something we need to discuss in detail over a conf call - but, combined with the web services we've been working on with GoogleSpreadsheets this could be a very interesting year for cheminformatics :) - Jean-Claude Bradley

@Egon - that sounds like a great application - if you have a sample NMR image I can try and see what happens - Jean-Claude Bradley

I dislike the mechanical turk interface, it is very hard to browse through it, also for taking qualification tests. So, beside the ability to take qualification tests, some additional review process (is this not the idea of crowdsourcing) would be a good way to ensure quality reponses. Or people could first provide some work for free and then get some real money from providing a larger amount of data. - joergkurtwegner

@Joerg - Yes it took some time to learn how to use the interface. But now that my templates are made it is a lot easier. I haven't used a qualification test yet but that certainly is something worth trying for the more complex tasks. - Jean-Claude Bradley

@Joerg - Quality control I think is something that MT does well routinely for cheap. That will be part of the process. - Jean-Claude Bradley

It strikes me that there are quite a lot of data collection tasks in the Open Access/Data area that MT might be able to perform -- for instance this (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/2008...) or some of these (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki...). - Bill Hooker

@Bill - absolutely could help there - the only question is who will fund :) - Jean-Claude Bradley

@Jean-Claude - good to hear that templates exist and help. - joergkurtwegner

@JC - I was more thinking about extracting assignments from detailed papers from natural product journals... but your idea is interesting too! - Egon Willighagen

@Egon - that would be even easier - Jean-Claude Bradley