grahamhead, that sounds interesting. i'm deep skilled on the requester side and have a few ideas of my own on how to exploit that massive workforce for profit. i've read the developer materials and the tos. it appears people above in this thread have learned how to skirt the tos. i'm not so sure they have though - it depends on how they structure the hits. if the worker perceives you're skirting the tos then you are screwed because they'll eventually flag you and now your account is frozen. that's a real hassle as each requester account is tied to an amazon account and amazon does a good job of checking identities.



so i'm wondering if there aren't some semi legitimate or whitehat ways to use mechanical turk for massive profit. there obviously are whitehat strategies that have been proven to work; castingwords does transcription, for example. and i think it's possible to break the tos but you have to cloak your intentions from the workers.



re: american workers. there is an easy way to filter out workers by region. it's totally within the api. i can't remember if it's part of 'qualifications' or some other section but yeah it's easy to filter by country.



sorry no secret sauce in this message. i've got some ideas and need help on them but haven't decided how to articulate them here. it just takes one stupid ego mistake and the whole show falls apart. that said i would love to brainstorm with others here about the opportunities because they are massive and they do require coordination and technical knowhow. i'm not opposed to scripting solutions myself using the requester tools etc. but the web interface is very powerful in its own right. how clever are we, because that is all that is keeping us from that lamborghini.