Why 'Mechanical Turk'?
August 4th, 2006
A little note on why we call our blog the “Mechanical Turk”. Pace Amazon's Mechanical Turk, we were drawn to the idea of something that appears to be artificial intelligence, but in reality is just a performance of human ingenuity. It speaks to what our web design & development is all about — work that looks very slick & polished but is the result of of craft.
You can read more about the actual Mechanical Turk on Wikipedia.
June 19th, 2007 at 01:56 PM How convenient for you that a ton of accidental traffic must be coming your way by commercial accident. It's like someone titling their wiki Wikinomics right after the bestselling book came out [i]and then not writing a thing about the book[/i]...as if you would have come up with the name on your own had it not been for the commercial branding/project.
October 25th, 2007 at 03:28 PM
Jon,
First of all, apologies that it’s taken me so long to respond. I was never notified of your message—I only found out about it today as we’re preparing four our switch to a different blogging engine.
I can see where you’re coming from—indeed, Ian got a few comments along similar lines at RailsConf Europe. But Amazon’s Mechanical Turk really wasn’t what was in our minds. My background is that of a historian & I thought of the “real” Mechanical Turk (see the Wikipedia link up above for more information). In fact, BBC Radio 4 had a documentary about the original Mechanical Turk a few months before we started the blog—almost certainly, that’s the kernel around which the name of this blog grew.
As for the rest of your comment: sorry, but it just doesn’t make any sense. Do you honestly think that we’re going to get traffic intended for Amazon? As an organisation, Amazon is, erm, slightly larger than we are & we’re not going to be at all well-served by competing against them.
And you also imply that we didn’t even mention Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Look back—it’s the first link in the post.
All that said, after the comments Ian received at RailsConf Europe, we’ve decided to change the name of the blog. We certainly don’t want to be associated, however unintented, with sleazy marketing tactics. The question is what to call ourselves. “Mechanical Bull”? “Young Turk”? I’ve been thinking about ideas revolving around the name of our company, but I’ve been given advice that suggests we should just give a simple descriptive, if boring, title—apparently bloggers & their readers are better served by that.
Best,
Ray
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 AM Power Turks :)