Sharon Chiarella is vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon.com’s "online marketplace for work," which connects people who want tasks done (for example, tagging web photos or doing small bits of research) with people willing to do them, often for pennies. Chiarella, a veteran of Kodak, Microsoft and Yahoo, joined Amazon in 2007, and is overseeing the company's efforts to expand the Mechanical Turk service. She talked to TechFlash about the power of crowdsourcing, how it's being used today, and why it shouldn't be used to sell Girl Scout cookies.

On the genesis of Mechanical Turk:

One of the things that Amazon concluded or understood was that having access to a workforce that’s around the world to do things that computer algorithms aren’t really good for was really important, not only to our business but an insight that would be important to other people’s businesses as well. That was generally the starting concept for it. Once we launched it into the marketplace, we learn every day from our customers. The ways they use Mechanical Turk is really much broader than we originally realized.

On ways in which Mechanical Turk is being used today:

We have businesses who are using Mechanical Turk to help them improve their search results. As an example, they might use workers to create key word tags for images or audio clips or podcasts or video. Because it’s hard for computers to pull out key words for those sets of formatted content. In addition to improving search, we have companies that are asking workers to rate search results. So "Here’s the search term, here’s what my search engine came back with, are these in the most relevant order, are they all relevant?" And they might even go so far as to say, “Here’s what a different search engine came back with, how would you compare them?” So they’re really using them to rate relevancy, which is something that’s really difficult for computers to make a judgment on.

On companies that are using Mechanical Turk:

A lot of the companies that use us consider Mechanical Turk their secret sauce. If you go up on the site, you’ll see some names. I can’t tell you the names.

On interesting ways that Mechanical Turk is being used:

The Enron documents became public documents and one company put up the Enron documents and asked workers to identify company names, names of people and places, and they were creating a searchable database to get to the various documents and sort through it. That was just interesting. We have one company that’s using it to feed an iPhone app that lets you find local produce. So you can see where you are, it looks at the GPS on the iPhone and it will tell you what is locally grown within your area. The way they create that database is they have workers find out what’s grown locally in those areas.

On other wacky uses for Mechanical Turk:

We have one person who created a book about cats and it was crowdsourced. Every chapter was a different author, which was kind of interesting. (Amazon CEO) Jeff (Bezos) actually bought a copy of that and had us all sign it … There’s also somebody who asked people to sing specific parts of a song and strung it together. It’s been used as a delivery service: Deliver a bag of potato chips to Room 214 at this hotel.

On Mechanical Turk’s workforce:

We have over 200,000 workers in 100 different countries, so we really are a 24-by-7 workforce. It follows the sun, if you will.

On the value of Mechanical Turk:

If you use a broad range of workers, you can get a lot done very quickly because they’re all working in parallel. So a big project that might take a really long time in calendar time can be done in a very compressed fashion.

On the use of Mechanical Turk to search missing people, such as adventurer Steve Fossett:

With Steve Fossett, unfortunately, the areas that workers were searching in were not the areas where he was found. But there were a lot of things found, a lot of missing aircraft that had been lost over the years, that were identified, which was pretty amazing. It always amazes me how big this country is that things could get lost and never be found. 

On Mechanical Turk being labeled a “virtual sweatshop”:

If you look at the tasks, you’re right, the tasks are in pennies. If you pay someone two cents to do a task and it takes then 10 seconds, that’s $7.20 an hour and we do have workers that are very efficient who get into a set of tasks and do it very quickly … The broader point is that we want to have an opportunity for businesses and workers to find each other and what we’re seeing over time is there’s a large breadth of work and there are a lot of workers who show up for a lot of different motivations.

A closer look at Sharon Chiarella:

What kind of car do you drive: A GM "I don't know what year it is ... it's several years old."

Profession you would try if not in technology: Teaching.

Hobbies: Biking, wall-climbing, and "learning to play golf." She's a Girl Scout leader, but promises she does NOT crowdsource cookie sales: "You're not allowed to. There's a lot of rules around Girl Scout cookie sales."

Favorite restaurant in Seattle: Metropolitan Grill. My favorite Italian restaurant is Sages in Redmond.

Favorite vacation spot: Hawaii.