Amazon have launched a new service called the Mechanical Turk.
The idea is that you can get jobs done that humans are better at doing than computers (finding things in pictures, translating text, etc). These jobs are called HIT’s (Human Intelligence Tasks).
People with spare time on their hands can elect to do these HITS and get paid small payments in return.
There’s also a Web2.0 web service for it, so you can incorporate the system into your own applications.
Check out some of the examples of the HIT’s on offer (hmmm get paid $0.03 to decide which picture best represents their store front…).