I'd heard of MT for months, but never checked it out. Then I needed to transcribe a tech conference so I decided to risk about $30 to do this. The going rate online is $90-$150 for an hour of audio. Six workers did 10 minutes each, mostly very good jobs. - randulo

Too lazy to blog, so I continue to tell myself my story :) - randulo

I assembled a few of workers (or Turkers, as they're called) and had a voice chat on Talkshoe: http://tr.im/amtchat is the result. If you go near the middle part and listen to the stories of these people from the USA and India, you can't help but see the potential - randulo

With that potential is an ocean of possible abuses: ridiculously low wages, scams of all kinds preying on the needy, sharks out there making a little too much money on the backs of honest people, wacko schemes to get clickthoughs, etc. - randulo

I see now that short articles we've commissioned on things like travel could be outsourced in this way and in fact have met and discussed this with a professional writer whose work I've looked at, so you aren't working totally blind. - randulo

Another problem is that as a requester, you can reject work and not pay a penny. Some requesters do so and then USE the work anyway. This is unconscionable to me, but they're out there. There is no apparent recourse to Amazon. - randulo

It's also extremely odd that thje web interface to AMT sucks, yet Amazon practically wrote the book on usability. They are probably waiting for thirdy party developers to do better ones with the API. - randulo

If you are reading this, and I know few people do, please take a look at MT (http://www.mturk.com) or better yet, listen to what a woman who lost her job and learned she was pregnant the same day has to say: http://tr.im/amtchat - randulo

June 12th, 2009, Tim O'Reilly: "Folks don't understand how impt mturk is." I'm feeling this now! - randulo