The original Mechanical Turk was a "robotic" chess player popular throughout Europe towards the end of the 18th century. There was a real human being hidden within the casing, however, doing tasks a robot couldn't for a couple of hundred years...

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a site where a human user can reach the parts the mechanical user can't.

Common tasks include lists of top three's - Food, Sport, Places to take a Date - general opinion things where a computer would find it to throw out a unique response.

Also common are requests to look at a website and select one or two pieces of information, again, something a computer couldn't necessarily do.

Other less common tasks include transcription, photography, translation, and city and country specific tasks (e.g. Good places to go in Phoenix, Arizona).

If you have an Amazon account, you can get paid either to a US bank account (if you are US based) or to an Amazon gift certificate account if you are based elsewhere in the world (canny of Amazon if you ask me, since non-US MT-users have no choice but to spend their earnings back through Amazon...).

In addition, it can take several days for a human being to approve your answers (I've been waiting on a few for three weeks now - shame they can't automate that!), and you're entirely at their mercy if they decide to reject your work. I've never had this happen, but I know of someone who spent five hours on a perfectly adequate transcript (they're a legal audio secretary) only to have it rejected with no reason.

So, if you have books to buy and time on your hands, have a look at Mechanical Turk.

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