Amazon's Mechanical Turk

This is pretty amazing, as Nicholas Carr put it, Amazon has out-googled google:

Amazon.com has out-googled Google with its creepily brilliant Mechanical Turk service, a means of embedding human beings in software code. If you're writing a program that requires a task that people can do better than computers (identifying buildings in a photograph, say), you can write a few lines of code to tap into the required human intelligence through Mechanical Turk. The request automatically gets posted on the Turk site, and people carry out the Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, for a fee set by the programmer, with Amazon taking a commission.

More details on Amazon's FAQ for their Mechanical Turk.