The fact that Jim Gray is missing is tragic and I hope he’s found safely soon, but hats off to Amazon for bringing their resoures to table in an attempt to help find him. From Michael Arrington’s post on Techcrunch:

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task - the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

Michael, thanks as always for the heads up and Amazon - thanks for trying to make a difference.