Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is one of many services that Amazon offers to developers. This one is a little more interesting then EC2 or S3, but in a very different way. EC2 and S3 allow you to buy Computing Power, but Mechanical Turk allows you to buy Man hours. Let me explain a bit.

You create a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) which asks a user to do something. something that a computer may be possible to do, but a human would be better at (say reviewing a document as assigning it keywords, as the example does). Each HIT has an allotted completion time, price, and some other bits a pieces. once you say the HIT is accepted, the person on the other end gets paid for completing their task.

Very simple, and yet extremely useful task. So, in the article here, they talk about using Windows Workflow Foundation to map out what to do. Very cool, very interesting idea. </p>

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