New Mechanical Turk Features

An upgrade to the Mechanical Turk's Requester API was released earlier today. Here are some of the most interesting features:

• Event Notifications - The Mechanical Turk can now use email messages or web service calls to inform the requester of a change in the status of a HIT.
• Richer HITs - HITs can now include embedded audio, video, Java applets, and Flash movies. The requester must host the files at a URL-accessible location (Amazon S3 is a perfect host, of course).
• Locale-based Qualification - HITs can now use local-based qualifications to restrict the HIT to workers living in a particular country.
• UTF-8 Support - HITs can now include UTF-8 encoded data in questions and in answers.

There's more information in this forum post.

-- Jeff;