ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick recently extolled the virtues of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for "rocking conference blogging." He's not the only person who's seeing some real benefits from outsourcing small tasks to the service, as I've noticed a number of people talk about the ways in which they use - or could envision using - Mechanical Turk to help them. Ewan McIntosh, for example, wonders if teachers could utilize the service to outsource some of the "larger scale time suckers" in education -- entering attendance records, generating letters to parents, and so on.

Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow. If you have an iPhone, you will be able to start doing that tonight. Siri, a virtual personal assistant, will recognize your voice query and either give you the answer to your question or connect you to the right web service.