YRUHRN? - To Crowdsource a Book, Of Course

I've written about crowdsourcing before, and this is an interesting application: writing a book called "Why Are You Here - Right Now" (YRUHRN).

Project YRUHRN was started with one idea in September of 2006. It all started with a HIT posted on Amazon's mTurk offering a penny for your answer to 'Why are You Here - Right Now?'. From that HIT, over 500 answers were given in a weeks time.

We have taken those answers, and compiled them in a book that will speak to a part of everyone.

We will see if it is possible, through crowdsourcing and the power of work-at-home people, if a book can be written and published in just 30 days from idea to publishing.

Evidently it was, and the result can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com (for a while, at least).

The Amazing Amazon Mechanical Turk

OK, so I may be well behind the times, but I still found this rather amazing when I came across it. Not so much for what it is - a version of Google Answers - but for the fact that Amazon is doing it.

Google I can understand: its Answers service is reaching the parts its other searches cannot - a complement to the main engine (albeit a tacit admission of defeat on Google's part: resorting to wetware, whatever next?). But Amazon? What has a people-generated answer service got to do with selling things? Come on Jeff, focus.

Cool name, though.