in General

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Now this is interesting.

This morning Amazon launched their “Mechanical Turk” service.

Essentially, they’ll pay you a few cents at a time to do menial tasks. Example tasks include picking the best picture of a business out of a list (I’d guess this is for the A9 yellow pages listings) for 3 cents, or writing an auto part description for $.75.

I did six tasks in a few minutes just now. Each task has to be approved by a mysterious process before you actually see payment. I’m interested in how long the process will take.

Nobody is going to get rich off of these tasks, but do a few at a time and you will eventually build up a nice chunk of Amazon change.

This could also be a boon for the businesses who need menial tasks done.