Just got home from Affiliate Summit 2006 in Las Vegas.  Great event put on by Shawn Collins and Missy Ward.  Congratulations to them for their success in hosting a growing conference.  (Unlike many of the declining conferences I’ve attended that past few years)

The networking allowed me to catch up with many old friends and business acquaintances, and to make some new friends.  In addition, there were some great educational sessions as well.  I was particularly interested in this part of the conference, as I’m in the process of launching my own educational services company, Conference Call University

Some things that came out of the conference:

Fredrick Marckini from iProspect gave a very enlightening presentation on the presence of search in our lives.  Not just on the Internet, but on our mobile phones, cable programming guides and more.  If you missed this one, I highly recommend you download the PDF HERE

Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa was also great (as usual).  She discussed “Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Opportunities for 2006” You can check out her PDF HERE.  Pay close attention to the part about landing pages.  Simple idea, a lot of power.  And yes, it’s something most of us KNOW, it’s just that most of us don’t DO IT!

One of the most valuable nuggets of information came from Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelist for Amazon.  He was talking about all of the many developer tools and API’s that are offered by Amazon Web Services.  Many were tools that only the most tech-savvy in the audience could relate to, and the audience was getting glassy-eyed.  Then he got to the final bullet of his presentation, Mechanical Turk.  The audience suddenly came to life, including me!  This is an AMAZING tool! 

You can check out the complete story of the original original Mechanical Turk here, but essentially, Amazon took the name because it combines what humans do best, with what machines do best, making the sum greater than the parts.  Using the Web as central repository for tasks, and humans as the intelligent nodes in the background, Mechanical Turk creates a most impressive distributed network that can achieve complex tasks fast and cheap. Some uses Mr. Barr cited for the Amazon Mechanical Turk:

*Internally, Amazon is using Mechanical Turk in their book scanning project to identify the orientation of Japanese text.  Japanese text can be written vertically or horizontally, and Amazon needed to figure out how to write software that could recognize which orientation the text was so it could be scanned properly.  They figured it would take a couple million dollars in programming time to create a system to do this.  Enter Mechanical Turk.  By utilizing the distributed human network, scanned pages are sent to human editors, who can simply glance at it and determine the orientation.  For a cost of only pennies, the editors provide Amazon with the vertical vs. horizontal answer. 

*A9 is using it for their Maps project, which seeks to create a directory where you put in an address, and it will pull up the GPS coordinates of a location, as well as an actual picture of the location.  So if you are going to look for a particular office building in an unfamiliar city, by using A9 Maps, you could pull up a picture of the building before you travel there so you know what it looks like.  A9 is using Amazon Turk to manage the distributed network of thousands of people who are driving around, taking pictures of buildings, and entering them in a database.

*A web site called CastingWords set up a podcasting transcription services using Mechanical Turk.  Simply upload your podcast, and Castingwords carves it up into 30 second chunks, and sends it to hundreds of people for transcription.  Once it is transcribed, the text is sent back through the system, compiled in order, and sent back to you.  The whole process can actually be done in as little as a half-hour, and costs $0.42 per audio minute.  About one-third the price of traditional transcription!

Mechanical Turk is in Beta right now, but is available to be customized with any use you can think of.  I can think of about ten great ideas right now, so I’ve got to go....