IS IT STILL BURGER-FLIPPING IF YOU HAVE A DESK? (via Tom Morin):

Life On The Web's Factory Floor: Who do you think turns all those words into an easy click? (Burt Helm, with Manjeet Kripalani in Bombay, 5/22/06, Business Week)

[A] new category of work is emerging: the digital factory job. Behind the seemingly magical offerings of the Internet are thousands of human beings madly inputting data around the clock. The work ranges from the slightly creative, such as Kempf's job of crafting sentences for ads to snag search traffic, to the rote -- typing in descriptions of hamburgers for online menus.

These digital bricklayers are in a sense building the new information pyramid. In Madras, India, "editors" making a fifth of U.S. pay work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to digitize archived American newspapers from the 1700s to the 1980s. In Boston, New York, and Palo Alto, Calif., Google Books workers manually turn each and every page of millions of library books so they can be scanned and made available to any visitor to the Google Web site.

In Hyderabad, India, typists for startup Menupages.com type the menus of thousands of U.S. restaurants so Web surfers can browse for reservation ideas or takeout. "Internet companies are realizing that you don't need to be a massive company to manage such operations," says Ravi Aron, assistant professor of operations and information management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He adds that process work is moving out of traditional places -- insurance claims processing, say -- and onto the Web.

Just like with a display of fresh oranges in a supermarket, far more labor goes into getting the digital product there than most people fathom.