I’ve been a bit of a Mechanical Turk junkie ever since I came across a mention of the service in a New York Times Magazine article about seventeen months ago. Now, it’s the rare day that I don’t stop by and check out what HITs are available. Overall it’s been a pretty great experience: by helping rank search engine results and categorize old books by subject matter, I learn more about the world I live in, and I feel like I now have a better sense of how certain kinds of academic and corporate research are conducted by coming across their endeavors here. It hasn’t all been positive, of course: I consider myself a writer by trade, and it’s always a little disheartening to see requesters offering fifty cents or a dollar for three- and four-hundred-word articles. It doesn’t matter if people are willing to work so cheaply; those are criminal rates no matter how you look at it, and they suggest a certain indifference toward quality, and even a bit of contempt toward the writer, on the requester’s part. Still, I’m thankful that Mechanical Turk has given me the chance to contribute to what seems to be a great number of research projects and start-ups in their beta phase. This is one of a relative handful of places on the internet where the ideal can be realized: people can actually share their knowledge with each other in order to make life a bit better for everyone.