I love Amazon’s new Mechanical Turk. The MT is a marketplace and transaction system for information processing tasks that humans can currently do better than computers.

At the moment, tasks are straightforward and most compensation seems to average about 10 cents per minute, so participation should blossom first in areas where this amount is a substantial local wage. Any company with large amounts of information needing processing that only a human could provide should stand to benefit by using this system.

If the system is successful, Amazon will be poised to take advantage of future technologies that can replace human performed information processing tasks. When a new technology is available, Amazon will already be connected to many customers, will replace the human processors with machine processors, and open their cash registers. Ka-ching. Brilliant!

Wikipedia is the world’s largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now. I use it at least once a day. My most recent query was about Perfect Numbers. I wasn’t disappointed.

Definitely worth putting on your list of resources.