Amazon recently released their mechanical turk service

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

It allows people to submit requests (by web services if required) for small pieces of work for human subjects to process. There seems to be quite a following

http://mturkey.blogspot.com/

http://turkers.proboards80.com/index.cgi

it seems like a useful revenue source if you have some spare time on your hands

"Mechanical Turk" comes from the famous hoax of hiding a chess master in a cabinet and claiming that it was a machine that was beating all oponnents and not the master himself.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/014029919X/026-8942662-7382048