ReadWriteWeb

In a quick succession of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as an update to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon's one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments. The updates to the Mechanical Turk are mostly meant to streamline the creation of new tasks by guiding businesses through the process more efficiently.

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a crowdsourced art project that led 10,000 artists, each paid one penny for their contribution, to recreate a US $100 bill one tiny section at a time. The brainchild of San Francisco artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, "Ten Thousand Cents" utilized Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and a bit of custom Flash software to lead 10,000 web workers in a coordinated, crowdsourced art project. The result is a rather impressive rendering of a US one hundred dollar bill drawn by an army of contributors.

Amazon's web services get a ton of press, but mostly in the context of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB or one of the company's other developer-centric offerings. One that doesn't get much coverage in the tech media these days is the Mechanical Turk service, which Amazon refers to as the "on-demand workforce." When it does get coverage, it is sometimes to level accusations that Amazon is offering workers at sweatshop wages. But are those concerns really valid? Just who are these workers?