Help Find Jim Gray With Web 2.0

Via TechCrunch:

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task – the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

If you’d like to help, go to this task on Mechanical Turk. You’ll be asked to view five satellite images and note any that should be looked at more closely.

This initiative took the web by storm. “Jim Gray” is already ranked 3rd on Technorati’s search terms.
Just an indication of how powerful the net could be with today’s technology…

I’m off to look at some photos of the water outside the San Francisco Bay…