Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service

Amazon’s Turk moniker comes from the “Turk” chess playing machine which toured 18th Century Europe, seemingly beating chess players. It was later revealed that a human player hide within the contraption. (Maybe a clever “ghost in the machine” or Ex Deus Machina jibe might be apt…).

So how does the Mechanical Turk differ from the other freelancer services like elance, rentacoder, workaholics et al.

The rates seem pretty cheap. Each HIT (or Human Intelligence Task) has a time rating and a cost rating.

I’ve seen tasks get farmed out for $0.01 for an hours work.

Take a look:

$0.09 for an hour’s work entering UPC (universal product code) information from food cans in your kitchen.

I guess it might not be too shabby for someone staying at home or in a less developed country where the median monthly income is about $100.

So the base rates are pretty low (although as the service gets popular you could expect it to get higher).

The other innovative feature is an API (application programming interface) which allows you to batch submit jobs to Mechanical Turk.