E-Lance - Thumbs Up!
A while back I wrote about my mixed experiences with Google Answers. Google’s service allows you to get answers to questions that can be easily researched with a search engine (i.e. Google) Prices are modest ($5-$50 in general, with a maximum of $200), but results for me were a bit spotty, and there were significant flaws in the service’s design and execution.
Last week I had a rather unusual need. I have a list of 125,000 words that I’m using in my casual word puzzle game. The list comes from the ENABLE public domain word list. For better or worse, it includes not only words one might find in Webster’s but also a fair amount of slang, and of particular concern, a variety of profanity and even a few racial slurs. The list makers were evidently trying to be comprehensive, and obviously not passing judgment, but nonetheless, for my all-ages targeted game, a lot of the words on the list were not suitable.
I started scanning the list from ‘aah’ to about ‘absorbencies’, but that’s only the first 500 words, and I quickly realized that this task was going to take multiple hours (about 5, by my estimate) to do right, and was something I could perhaps off-load.
So I decided to try www.elance.com. Unlike Google Answers, E-Lance is more oriented at actual jobs, that require programming, writing, editing, and so on. Price ranges for E-Lance seem to be much higher than Google Answers – indeed the lowest category at which you can put a job out for bid is ‘under $250’ (whereas $200 was the absolute upper limit for Google Answers). So I posted my project ‘Find the objectionable words’, in the under $250 category, with a 3 day window for people to bid.
To my surprise, I had 26 people bid on the project! Most seemed like relatively experienced editors and users of E-Lance. Among other things, with each bid you can see the dollar value of all work each bidder has done through e-lance recently – several bidders had done in the low $thousands.
Most bids were between $150-$200 – not cheap for 5 hours of work, but not ridiculous either. However, I decided to take a chance on the lowest bidder, who had come in at $50. I sent him the word list on Friday with detailed instructions, and got back the edited lists today. He did a great job – more thorough than I expected. I paid him (a little extra, actually), left glowing feedback, and am looking forward to using E-Lance again.
Downsides? The site is rather slow, and the navigation links are not as clear as I would like.
But if I can consistently put small jobs on this site and have them expertly completed in under a week, I will become a steady E-Lance customer. It’s very useful when you’re working solo like me, and don’t have an intern/junior associate to hand off the grunt work to. Thumbs up for E-Lance!
