Crowdsourcing is one of those ideas whose time never quite seems to come, thanks to the challenges associated with managing all those anonymous people. Not to mention the hassle of sorting out the diligent workers from the opportunists and slackers. Content tagging, validation, research are all monumental tasks that seem like a fit for crowdsourcing; yet each can erase any hope of an ROI thanks to both the cost of the workforce and the daunting prospect of managing the project.

In this session you'll learn how others, including Amazon, use crowdsourcing to solve these problems, while effectively managing the land mines described above. This talk will focus on trends in crowdsourcing including Amazon Mechanical Turk, which enables access to an on-demand internet-scale workforce. This web service is one of several offered by Amazon Web Services, which is related to but not directly part of Amazon.com.