Is there a Mechanical Turk alternative?

Perhaps www.odesk.com can work for you. I’ve had professional data entry work provided to me for as low as USD 1.67 / hour. And I rated the job 5 stars as of completion.

The problem with Turk is that even if you do figure out how to get results for a large project you have to review every result yourself or pay someone else to manage it. Odesk has similar issues for larger projects.

You might try something like CloudCrowd. They have their own workforce, and will design your project for you and build in a number of reviewers and check questions to make sure your work is done correctly. For a good sized project the price can end up being less than what it would cost to do it on Turk because you don’t have to pay someone else to review the results. www.cloudcrowd.com

Another company, CloudFlower, uses Mechanical Turk’s platform, but offers some consulting as well.

@lofty doesn’t mean CloudFlower but CrowdFlower — http://crowdflower.com/

There’s an artical here about the various turk style sites that have popped up. It’s mostly oriented from a worker point of view but it’s probably still useful

http://thequill.org/personal-finance/9-making-money-on-line-part-2-microworking-.html

There is another newcomer which is heavily tied in with facebook. It’s called little-favours http://apps.facebook.com/little-favours