"Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it."

"HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer."

Amazon.com is facilitating a distributed, human API... clever! But is it useful? I imagine would require a fairly rapid response for it to be useful to them. Rapid responses will require a rather large, ravenously active distributed team. Active devotion necessitates desirable rewards in exchange for participation. Currently, the reward is change added to your Amazon.com account balance.

The Language Log has some interesting insight:

I also wonder how Amazon prevents this from being used for the most obvious single application, namely helping spammers circumvent captchas?

A post at Bitporters media gives one Turk-worker's experience:

"So four days and 505 HITs later I'm sitting at a cool $6.84. Note: More than half of my HITs are still in the pending state. I'm getting pretty quick at cracking these off, with my tabletPC I'm down to < 5-10 seconds pet HIT. At 3 cents a hit, I'm not really sure if this is a waste of time or not, for now I'm just going to do enough to buy a book I've been wanting."

If you can really keep up 10 HITs per minute at $.03 per HIT, that's $18/hour, which would appeal to a lot of people, especially for a job that you can do from any location, whenever and for however long you like.

How might your use it? Clever friends and strangers alike, please weigh in!
http://tinyurl.com/7typb
http://tinyurl.com/d6xt9

More info and a photo of the original Mechanical Turk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk