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Try Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Inexpensive Labor | Practical eCommerce
Try Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Inexpensive Labor | Practical eCommerce
What Is a Mechanical Turk?
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is really a crowd-sourcing service or marketplace wherein a “requester†posts simple tasks that human “workers†can complete quickly and easily, earning a nominal payment.
The name Mechanical Turk is a nod to an eighteenth century chess playing machine, which Wolfgang von Kempelen built to apparently impress royalty and earn money. The Turk was supposed to be a machine that played chess against human opponents — actually beating Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. Eventually, it was revealed that the Turk was not actually a chess-playing machine at all, but rather it was an elaborate puppet of sorts, which was operated by various human chess masters hidden inside of a cabinet.