Because some WeoGeo Market users reported that they were not receiving email notifications, we had a need for User Testing across a variety of email platforms. Enter Mechanical Turk:

We created a 6 question survey focused on our registration and email validation process and offered 2 cents per completed survey. After only 3 batches of 6 surveys (18 total for a whopping 36 cents!) we identified and confirmed problems with AOL, MSN Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail blacklisting IPs owned by EC2. Other EC2 users had reported similar problems which quickly led us to a solution.

The average time from release to completion for all of the surveys was about 45 minutes and the quality of the responses is very good. No corners were cut by the Automatons. This has been such a success that we will look to make more tests focused on other aspects of our web site.

O’Reilly Network — Web 2.0 Podcast: A Conversation with Jeff Bezos:

What business is Amazon.com in? Founder Jeff Bezos tells Web 2.0 Summit program chair Tim O’Reilly that there are three components. He says that everyone knows about the consumer-facing and seller-facing businesses. Bezos spent most of his time talking about their developer-facing business, with elements such as S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Amazon’s goal is to take the pieces of the heavy-lifting infrastructure that don’t differentiate your business from any other and provide them “by the drink” so that they change from a fixed cost to a variable cost.You can download the audio as an mp3 or download the video as an mp4. Here are all of the Web 2.0 Summit Podcasts released so far. You can also subscribe to the audio podcast or to the video podcast.