Steve Fossett, Amazon.com and some extra cash for you

Steve Fossett is a millionaire adventurer who disappeared with his plane, somewhere over the Nevada desert. You want to help find him? Head over to Amazon.com.

The online books-and-everything-else seller has a rather nifty, but not well-known, service. It is called Amazon Mechanical Turk and its tagline is “Artificial artificial intelligence”. Basically, it is “a marketplace for tasks that require human intelligence, called ‘HITs’, which stands for ‘human intelligence tasks'”.

In simple language, humans are paid to complete tasks that people do better than computers. Such as interpreting text, analysing pictures or describing beauty.

How does this help Steve Fossett?

You can help find him by using your internet connection, and your eyes, to survey the satellite images of the Nevada desert. You would be looking for an image of a plane, or anything that might look like a plane crash. If you think you have found something relevant, you flag it for review.

So far, there has been no great success for the volunteers looking through the satellite images, although they have located seven previously unrecorded plane crashes in the desert. So the theory works. You can do your bit by clicking here. To see how tens of thousands of others are helping, visit Amazon’s blog post on the subject. You will see some sample images of planes that have already been found.

You will not be paid for this specific task, but if you are looking to make some extra cash, there is plenty of opportunity to do so. For instance, look at The Sheep Market. Users were paid $0,02 to draw a sheep online. Yep, a sheep. And about 1 000 people did so successfully, making themselves an average of $0,69 per hour. And now the sheep are being sold for $20.

Here are some more options:

You can find these, and more, here.

You might not be able to retire, true, but drawing sheep can be fun. Finding missing people ain’t so bad either.