At Kurt's suggestion, I took a look today at Amazon's "work marketplace", Mechanical Turk http://www.mturk.com/

In very simple terms, as a Requester you put up HITS which are clearly defined tasks that you want performed by one or multiple Workers. Example HITS: Bookmark a site in del.cio.us (0.05), write a comment (0.01), submit a blog post to yearblook (0.25)...

The stunning part about it are the rates; the figures next to the examples above are the amounts being paid in US$ for each job. Amazon adds a 2.5% fee and you have to have sufficient funds deposited in your Amazon Payments account to cover your work and fee liabilities.

A warrior used it to have sentences rewritten for $0.05 each; each sentence went to 25 people (you set the rate and you can use as many or as few people as you wish) and he ended up with enough content for 700 articles. He didn't say how many sentences he put out but on the assumption that a small article has about 60 sentences, 60 sentences * 25 people * 0.05 = $75 for what turned into 700 spun articles. He said the quality of work was extremely high.

The main disadvantage for me is that at the moment only US residents (in effect, owners of a US credit card or bank account) can deposit funds in an Amazon Payments account and consequently request work. To get around that, if you have way too much time on your hands you can become a Worker and use the amounts you earn to fund your Amazon Payments account. I did 6 very small jobs today just to see how the system works; they are all still pending approval by the Requesters.

It is against Amazon's TOS to use this service to get people to click on your ads, or to ask any Worker for personally identifiable information.

There is of course nothing to stop a US resident creating an account and taking prepaid "orders" from other people; a site called http://www.hit-builder.com/ does exactly that but it requires a wire transfer from non-US citizens.

This could be a great BombSquad group project if someone is prepared to act as the main Requester for the group and the rest prepay their orders to him/her via Paypal for example. Output could be exclusive or shared.

There is enormous scope here to have all kinds of tasks performed for very low rates, not just content production .. take a look at the HITS up there now and you'll see the variety of things people are using it for http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false

Not a goer for me on my own unfortunately, but I'd be very interested in a group project.

Isobel