Over the past few weeks we had the opportunity to work with FanFeedr to put together some widgets for their sports news platform. Previously, FanFeedr had been using Sprout to build their widgets but this required someone to hand build a Flash widget for every “resource” on FanFeedr (there are a lot). In addition, since the Sprout widgets are Flash they aren’t easily crawled by search engines.

Our widgets are different. They allow FanFeedr to generate widgets on the fly for any of their pages and allow users to customize the color schemes. Check out a widget builder for the NY Yankees here.

Basically, our widget builder works by allowing users to customize the size and colors used in the widget. This data is serialized as a JSON object and then base64 encoded so that it can be sent to the “generator” on the server. Then, the server unpacks the payload and builds a widget according to the data specified in the JSON object. In addition, our embed code includes a noscript tags so that search engines pick up the links in the widget as well.

Anyway, working with FanFeedr was a great experience and we hope to continue our relationship moving forward. Go build yourself a widget!

A week or so ago my Dad asked if we could have our designer put together a logo for him. Unfortunately, our guy was buried under a mound of work and generally couldn’t help us out. We haven’t always had the best luck with Craigslist so I was ready to try something new.

Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing a good amount of chatter surrounding “spec” design sites especially 99designs.com. After taking a look around the site I figured now was a good time to give it a shot. We were on a tight budget, tight time line, and my Dad didn’t have much direction for the logo.

I posted up a contest last Sunday here and we were looking at entries by Monday afternoon. Now things got more difficult. We were having a hard time coming up with “star ratings” and constructive feedback in general. My Dad’s staff was having a hard time not getting pigeon holed by the submitted designs and Setfive wasn’t doing a great job helping them along.

We did our best and we felt like the entries were moving in the right direction. Then the contest closed. In the last 8 hours of the contest the number of entries nearly doubled. With 70 entries we now had the problem with objectively picking a winning logo.

At this point, I wanted some more input on what people thought about the logos. I decided to create a set of Amazon Mechanical Turk tasks to get some feedback.

After about a day, I had 200 responses asking for user’s top three logos and any additional comments they had.

Some of the comments I got back were insightful and moving:

• Don’t pick any of the logos on the second page. They all look terrible.
• Due to nature of your business I would prefer a sober and serious looking logo.
• I chose these three because they are visually appealing, and convey a sense of being able to ease pain.
• I suffer from cronic pain. I wish you the best of luck in finding your logo. People that do your type of work are a life line for people like me. Hope I hope have helped.

I tallied up the results by weighting +3, +2, +1 for first, second, and third choices respectively. The results were interesting.

• Every logo received at least one vote.
• The top ten logos accounted for just about 41% of all the votes.
• Only counting the top choice caused 3 logos to fall out of the top ten.

The top ten logos as voted by the Amazon Mechanical Turks were:

Personally, I like the top ten logos and my Dad’s staff seems to like many of the same logos that were voted up. It’s been an interesting experiment almost exclusively using the “crowd” to design and then select a logo. I’m not sure if we’ll use 99designs in the future but it has been a pleasant experience.

We still haven’t picked a winning logo but I’ll update once we do!

Update:

We finally picked a winner! We decided to go with the crowd and selected http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/88 as the winning logo.

One of our clients came to us a few days ago asking us if we could build something to aggregate several RSS feeds and then display it on their site.

Easy enough. Except the caveats were 1) This had to be done on a shoe string budget and 2) We had no permission to script on the server side (only client side scripting allowed kids).

We put our heads together and realized that Yahoo Pipes would provide the functionality to easily combine several RSS feeds, sort them, filter them, ect. And best part? It’s all built and all free. Pipes also provides the functionality to export a pipe as a JSON feed (as opposed to RSS).

So that takes care of problem 1 and almost fixes problem 2. Of course the remaining problem is getting around the cross domain XHR restrictions on the JSON. I did some poking around the Yahoo Pipes documentation and it turns out you can add a _callback parameter to the URL and bang it wraps the JSON in a JS callback!

Issues solved. The final part was to mix in a little jQuery to load the JSON+callback feed into a <script> tag and then display it.

Total lines of code: 27 lines of javascript.

EDIT. Now with code! rsspipes

So Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a pretty neat service called the Mechanical Turk. The name of the service is inspired by this story where a human was hidden inside a chess playing “robot” which impressed crowds during the late 18th century. Amazon’s service doesn’t hide the fact that its powered by humans but the end result is the same – humans performing tasks in lieu of a computer.
The task we needed “turked” was the transcription of various text labels that were on top of overlays on a particular large image. The goal of all of this was a Google Maps product so we all ready had the overlays loaded into a Google Maps UI.  To recap:

• We had a Google Maps application which loaded an image layer with about 3000 discrete overlays.
• We had lat/lng coordinates for all of these overlays.
• Each of these images had a text label that uniquely described it.
• We wanted the Turks to transcribe these labels.

Next, we began to investigate how the Mechanical Turk service actually works. The process is delightfully simple. The idea is to break the tasks out into discrete and reproducible actions called human intelligence tasks (HITs). This pattern aligned well with our problem because all of the overlays were independent and we had coordinates for each of them. Amazon displays each of these HITs inside a template that the “requester” constructs.

The templates are HTML pages (Amazon allows javascript) which plug-in variables for each HIT when the tasks go live. They also capture the data that you want to save from the task – in our case the labels. Designing templates is pretty straightforward and javascript is a nice touch.

For our task, we embeded Google Maps with our image overlaid and used HIT variables to display 3 markers per task. This is where we hit our first and only snag. Because of directory restrictions on Google Maps API keys our HIT template kept generating javascript errors because it was being executed on un-predictable domain names. We didn’t think this was a huge deal so we plowed ahead as planned.
We ran the first set of HITs with a 2 cent/HIT payment and a minimum approval rating of 95%.

The results were less than stellar – within an hour or so we received this email:

A strange error message pops up for your/these HITS.
“The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/.”
Also, the mouseover that displays at screen bottom is “javascript: void (0)”…and no label appears below the marker either.  I do NOT have any javascript blockers operational, so no problem there.
Also, I would appreciate it if you NOT deny me credit for this HIT, as the technical error message was not my fault and not explained or warned in the instructions.
I would like to do several, possibly many of these HITS, if you can tell me what to do to overcome this problem.
Thanks,
[REDACTED]

People were obviously not getting the instructions and were scared away by the JS error and fear of HIT rejection. One of the problems with the service is that you can’t modify your HIT template once a set has been published. You have to cancel the batch and re-start after your edits. At this point, we decided to cancel the run and modify the instructions. With the new instructions people seemed to “get it” and were generally more willing to forgive the JS error.

At the end of the run, the accuracy of the Turks was around 90% or so on transcribing the labels. We got about 25 man hours of work accomplished in about 42 hours of actual time at a cost of about $25. All told we were really impressed with the service as well as the Turks themselves. We definitely recommend the service for any discrete and repeatable tasks.

Things we learned:

• Be EXTREMELY clear in your instructions – try to be as un-ambiguity as possible.
• The Turks live and die by their approval rating so be nice (we just accepted every task).
• Unexpected popups and JavaScript errors probably scare people away so try to avoid them.
• Obviously higher reward rates are going to attract more Turks – something to take into account.

We’ve also recently become fascinated by other things that could be played out or experimented with the Turks. Notably it seems like an ideal venue to experiment with some game theory topics.