I'm sure most of you are familiar with the recent disappearance of Steve Fossett, an American aviator, adventurer, pilot and holder of several world records.  Yesterday was the 5th day of search and rescue efforts over the area where Mr. Fossett's aircraft is believed to have gone down if that's the case.  Of course I'm sure he would have turned up by now if his plane hadn't gone down but why not try to think positively, right?

So anyway, the reason for this article is to let you all know about something that we can do to aid in the search and rescue efforts that I've never seen done until today.  You can actually login on Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" beta site and go over new satellite imagery from the area where search and rescue teams are looking for Mr. Fossett.  It is after all a Sunday so what else do you have to do but spend countless hours on your computer looking at satellite imagery from 1500 ft up?

I'm not sure how many will participate in this task but I really think something like this could be useful for any search and rescue effort especially when it's in a desolate area like the area he was flying over.  Of course the problem is that usually satellite imagery provided to the public is usually out of date and could be several years old.  We all know that the reason this search and rescue effort has been granted with these images and this "Where's Waldo" application is because Steve Fossett is very rich and has connections with people that are far wealthier than any of us could ever imagine ;).  Hopefully something great will come from this effort and this type of thing will become a standard.  What could be better than bored people searching for missing persons at 1am?

It's actually a really quick process too.  All you have to do is sign in, read the instructions about what to look for and then just flip through the images provided at the bottom; flagging ones that you believe contain something to be looked at more closely.  I'm not pleading you to do this but if you're bored, check it out.  I think it's pretty cool.