Content area
Full Text
Online labor pool: New work model or digital sweatshop?
A unregulated piecework industry is expanding on the Internet with a growing workforce.
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. - The job didn't pay much: four bucks an hour if you really hustled. But for Catherine Fraser, a recent community college grad from Mountain View looking to pick up a little extra spending cash, the work was a hoot.
Crowd Labor Service
Catherine Fraser transcribes a phone conversation of an insurance claim on a crowd-sourced labor site at her home in Mountain View, Calif. Crowd-sourced labor, harnessing the collaborative nature of the Internet, is beginning to boom.
McClatchy Newspapers
Select images available for purchase in the
Maine Today Photo Store
"I told a friend 'I'm now working in the porn industry' because I had to watch little clips of adult movies for a minute or two and then give them titles," says Fraser, 35, part of a growing global army of people making pennies in their spare time doing piecemeal - and often quirky - online micro-tasks. "We were limited to a small number of characters and...