I have toyed with the idea of using Turk to generate some content for a project..just to get the ball rolling. I feel that this project is suffering from the empty parking lot syndrome. Is seeding your site cheating/wrong?
There have been other HN discussions about seeding your site, and the consensus seems to be that it's OK if done ethically. I'd say paying users to generate stuff is fine. Just don't steal copyrighted material, don't pay people to reword someone else's content. Keep them generating original material and I don't see any problems.
Data IS part of the design process.<p>As for Mechanical Turk, take a look at some of the papers Greg Little has published from MIT to get some creative ideas as to how to use Mechanical Turk.<p>If you're a Rails developer, take a look at my gem Turkee to easily integrate with Mechanical Turk ( <a href="http://github.com/aantix/turkee" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/aantix/turkee</a> ).