For the last few years we've been using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for a variety of different tasks. One such example is gathering content for newsletters and blog post posts. The number of willing volunteers on the Mechanical Turk website is enormous so if you are looking to spice up your emails, blogs or other user facing content - there is a vast amount of people there who, for example, know all the best jokes which could help you increase click through rates for your emails. Clearly - careful moderation is required!

Do make sure that you make reasonable requests though. E.g. trying to get a back link from a Page Rank 5 URL for 5.00 is not going to get you anywhere and will result in many Mechanical Turks trying to do anything to get their hands on your 5.00. So my Mechanical Turk - top tips are:

• Realize that there is a vast number of people out there who know much more than you do
• Accept that you have to approve your hits. Especially if the fee you are willing to pay is attractive. May of he volunteers will wait for auto approval after x days
• Accept that not everyone speaks English so some of your hits may not be as good as you like
• Make reasonable requests at a reasonable price as you get what you pay for