I learned about Mechanical Turk accidentally, while mindlessly surfing the internet one day. I thought it was odd that people were willing to pay for opinions from random people, or for articles like this, or a simple judgment call on whether or not a photograph was pornographic. Since signing up, I’ve worked a couple of thousand HITS and had some fun with it. My favorite tasks are polls and surveys, most especially the surveys about moral dilemmas. These surveys have led to some long conversations between my husband and me, playing different sides of a jury’s judgment on dramas laid out on the screen. Other fun tasks are voice-transcription HITs. It’s a challenge to understand some of the voices, especially when they seem to be recorded from a cell phone. I turn up the volume on speakers very loud, and it scares my cats! I enjoy these tasks, but the cats do not. Some of the tasks I have run across pay such a ridiculously low amount, I won’t spend my time on them. I find that if I leave my comfortable territory of polls and surveys, I spend more time looking for a task that pays a fair amount for the effort required. Mechanical Turk has led to other, more profitable ventures into the world of internet independent contracting, too. None of these are enough to replace my full time job outside the home, but all totaled, they are a good source of beer and sushi money, and I will continue.