Besides your finances, the other major constraint for any Internet marketer is time – there’re only 24 hours in a day.

And Amazon’s new outsourced service boasts a few interesting innovations…

Amazon’s Turk moniker comes from the “Turk” chess playing machine which toured 18th Century Europe, seemingly beating chess players. It was later revealed that a human player hide within the contraption. (Maybe a clever “ghost in the machine” or Ex Deus Machina jibe might be apt…).

So how does the Mechanical Turk differ from the other freelancer services like elance, rentacoder, workaholics et al.

The rates seem pretty cheap. Each HIT (or Human Intelligence Task) has a time rating and a cost rating.

I’ve seen tasks get farmed out for $0.01 for an hours work.

Take a look:

$0.09 for an hour’s work entering UPC (universal product code) information from food cans in your kitchen.

I guess it might not be too shabby for someone staying at home or in a less developed country where the median monthly income is about $100.

So the base rates are pretty low (although as the service gets popular you could expect it to get higher).

The other innovative feature is an API (application programming interface) which allows you to batch submit jobs to Mechanical Turk.

If you’re compiling keywords for a PPC compaign, you can automate quite a bit of work.

If you’re a direct mail marketer, you can get quite a bit of work done too.

I’m not sure how telco connections would be like, but I’m thinking you could buy your outsourcer skype credit and get them to do some phone work for you too.

Given Amazon’s data mining technology given it’s vast book and other product inventory, tracking and analytics on the outsourcers. It’s mentioned that “Requesters (the person giving the job) can specify that people who work on their HITs must first complete a qualification test, giving Requesters the opportunity to vet the skill level of the people working on their HITs beforehand.”

The freelancers are aged 18 or older and must have an Internet connection (I guess some of them might be on dial-up….)

How much does the service cost?

From their FAQ, Amazon “collects a fee of 10 percent on top of what Requesters pay to have tasks completed. For example, if a HIT pays $0.20, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects $0.02. The minimum commission charged is $0.005 per HIT. ”

I would not suggest that any Internet marketer start doing HITs, your time is better spent doing something else. The list of tasks outlined is quite insightful…

How do I use the Mechanical Turk?

You need a US billing address and bank account. Or if you’re an individual, a US driver’s license (incidentally I earned my US driver’s license in about 7 days, so take a 2 week holiday if you don’t live in the US or register a US corp…)

Is it any good? Mechanical Turk is a subsidiary of Amazon and the Turks are being used on projects like Amazon’s A9 search engine.

I would think the Turks should be good for article submissions, directory submissions, possibly content rewriting and a lot of the ‘grinding’ type tasks.

For more information, visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk website.