From the Frugal Law Student today, here’s a good way to pick up a few extra bucks while you’re sitting around online. Amazon has started a new site called Mechanical Turk (based off an 18th century hoax).

Computers can handle many things, but certain things they can’t, such as look at a picture and determine how many street signs are in the picture. Mechanical Turk capitalizes on that and has real people do the sort of work computers cannot do. Corporations hire people to do what is called a HIT (Human Intelligence Task). HITs pay very little money- but the "jobs" are really easy. I tried this out, and answered some demographics questions for 1 cent apiece, and drew a lightbulb (badly) for 5 cents. I also answered whether or not Eminem grew up in a tough neighborhood (I didn’t think so) for another penny.

In a few minutes I earned the princely sum of 32 cents. At this rate, I figure I’ll be able to buy a few books from Amazon in a year or less. Still, this article says a man claims to earn about $100 a week on Mechanical Turk by only working on it a couple hours a day. That sounds pretty good to me. I’d better get back to work drawing lightbulbs.