I've been intrigued by Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" ever since they made it available for anyone to use by means of its Web Services API (application programmer interface). The inspiration for the name is a chess playing machine built in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, who alleged that it used "artificial intelligence" to defeat most opponents. The "Turk" was a life-sized wooden model seated behind a cabinet that concealed a human chess master hidden behind an assortment of mechanical parts.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk site provides a technical and payment infrastructure that allows

...developers to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

Follow up:

If you visit Mturk.com, you will find that Amazon and others are using the site's anonymous workers to produce new content, clean up digitally-produced content, and edit the work of other "Mturks." The pay for this work is well below minimum wage. Yet, the tasks, known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), seem to get done anyway.

One reason is that the tasks are broken down into fairly small chunks, sometimes making them almost mindless to complete. Since no long-term commitment is required, you can do the work or not. Pennies earned at odd moments do add up.

Another reason may be that Mturk is actually paying people to do things that they might do for no pay anyway. The web is primarily fueled by people giving content away. Wikipedia is an excellent example of crowd-written content by volunteer authors.

Currently the YRUHRN project is utilizing the service more fully than I have seen in the past. The project is Crowdsourcing a book based on the question "Why are you here right now?" The project's HITs include everything from writing the content, writing and executing a marketing plan, and soliciting related videos on YouTube based on the same question. The latter tasks are something that most YouTube contributors provide for no pay. The difference, of course, is that a project paying for a service, even at very low rates, is able to specify the content so that the whole amounts to something coherent -- in this case, a book.

I am reasonably sure that someday I'll get around to launching my own crowd-sourced content project, but for now, I am excited to watch and learn from the efforts of the YRUHRN project!