Outsourcing the grunt work of a web article

I wonder how many workers today privately outsource tedious tasks like this:

Philip Greenspun's Weblog

... I estimated that it would take me 10 hours to assemble these data by clicking around at Amazon. It is a bit more involved than you'd think because for many of these items, Amazon requires you to 'add item to cart to see price'. Anyway, I put the project up on www.rentacoder.com and a guy from Pakistan did the job in two days for $10. He made only a couple of mistakes."

This is where huge productivity boosts can arise. Good to see a real-world example of what's long been theoretical.

A corporation I know of recently implemented a Dilbertian "educational" program on corporate security. Important topic, horrendous delivery and evaluation mechanism. Next time they do something like that employees may be tempted to outsource the process of doing the training and taking the exam ...