Andy Baio has put the power of the Mechanical Turk to great use in analyzing Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals Album (do you see what he did there with the title? - you can download for free and/or buy an as-yet-unreleased CD). There’s graphs detailing the start-points of the different samples in different tracks as well as the release-years of the songs they come from.
The results are worth a look, but the write-up of the methodology is what to me is really interesting, detailing just how well the Turk system can work for tasks like this. I came across this write-up just this morning of one user’s experience with Amazon’s system that gives a glowing review, he managed to get confirmation of more than 6000 business contact details for just $300 and gives some useful tips for others thinking of putting the system to use.
Returning briefly to Girl Talk, Wired recently had an piece showing the different samples, with timings, in a pretty diagram that works pretty well.
