Saturday, June 28, 2008

Internet Program: Sell your old papers, book reviews, etc. for $15 each

Essay mills, paper sales, and so forth aren't new. The Internet, though, has made them more widely available. Technology is catching up, though; companies such as Turnitin.com allow professors and teachers to compare papers with a database of known papers, to weed out plagiarism.

Oboulo.com is one of the newest players in the "we only sell these papers as 'reference guides' and would never encourage anyone to turn one of these papers in as their own" websites. What's unique about Oboulo, though, from the writer's standpoint, is that they pay a flat fee, upfront, for your work.

In addition, while Oboulo is new in the English language world, they're not new in France and Brazil, where they've gained tremendous popularity.

Here's how it works: register at Oboulo and upload a document you want to sell. Fair warning: you have to sign a "work for hire" contract, which means you've just signed the copyright over to Oboulo. If you're a grad student and you might publish part or all of a paper, BAD MOVE.

You can't retain/reuse any of your paper if you sell it to Oboulo and later the Journal of Very Important Tenure Track Jobs comes a-calling and wants your paper titled "Shakespeare, Transgender, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk: Amorphous Social Dichotomies, Sexual Economies, and Scatalogical Digressions of Microlending Communities in .NET".

On the other hand, if your review of Emile Zola's "Germinal" from 1990 is just molding in the closet, why not spend 15 minutes typing it up and make $15?

If you're so inclined to sell your work to worried-well undergraduates who have money to burn, then you get a straight $10 for selling your work to Oboulo, but you can get $15 if you enter MY "ambassador" code when you upload a paper: 70bbbe

I used someone else's ambassador code, uploaded an old paper I never plan to use again, and it was accepted within 24 hours. Payment is processing (haven't received it yet). $15 via PayPal (yes, you have to use PayPal).

Yes, I make money when you use this code. It is the Jedi Way of the Internet Ref ID. You make an extra $5 when you use my code, so have a gallon of gas on me (but hurry before prices go up).

70bbbe

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Internet Program: Amazon's Mechanical Turk (this is a weird one, folks...)

So imagine a freelance site where you can make anywhere from $.01 (yes, one penny) to $8 for anywhere from 3 seconds of work to about an hour.

Amazon Mechanical Turk does this. Register using an existing Amazon.com account. Sign up for Amazon Payments (they walk you through it). And then go to Amazon Mechanical Turk and find, oh, 15,000 possible "freelance" jobs. Labeled "Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs, these are bite-sized jobs that you do, and you earn real money doing them.

I've earned ONE ENTIRE PENNY using their system, have another THIRTY CENTS waiting to be approved, and will earn another $.50 shortly! Woo hoo!

You won't get rich doing this. Really. But you can convert the pocket change into Amazon.com gift certificates. You can find something fun to do in between reading about Jamie Lynn Spears and Yahoo's demise.

:)