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Google Discovers Tom Sawyer
by Andrew McCaskey
Crowdsourcing is all the rage – and Google does it in a reverse Mechanical Turk – right out of Tom Sawyer.
Mechanical Turk is the Amazon system where people are paid a few fractions of a cent to look at a browser and decide if a page contains automobiles or boats, then hit the button.
Today’s newly announced Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – provided by Google.
. When you’re done, Google takes a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn’t already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.
It’s work disguised as a game – and as a break for a minute or two, I expect that Google is going to be pretty successful in getting the cooperation and participation of hundreds of thousands worldwide.
The only thing that would improve it ? a Leaderboard with the square footage drawn. That would get the biggest buildings quickly built out. Then, harness a team approach of square footage versus number of buildings, to provide weighting favoring the smaller structures.
It’s a notch above Windows Solitare, and would include bragging rights at no charge.
Google Building Maker
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