In this case, I hired people to perform sentiment tagging of status updates for the training of SVM regression models. oDesk allowed me to interview more caref

In this case, I hired people to perform sentiment tagging of status updates for the training of SVM regression models. oDesk allowed me to interview more carefully and ended up working better. I wrote a quick Rails scaffold that let people rapidly tag statuses. Edit: Something like CloudFlower might also have worked well, but I didn't want to pay for it. The key was that I needed to ensure a baseline level of quality in all of the taggings. (Although, to some extent, I could take consensus labels.)