There are lots of outsourcing sites, but I don't know of any that have mostly students providing services. Most outsourcing services are provided by people from countries with relatively lower cost of living, such as India. Although there are some U.S. providers on those sites (including myself). For many of us, its a way to make a living as a professional rather than making quick cash on "light coding" or something. The web designer I work with on odesk is very experienced and skilled with Photoshop.

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from data and generally speaking is a more advanced information processing task, so it is inaccurate to refer to it as a "techish mini job". There are plenty of skilled outsourcing providers that can do data mining.

The most popular outsourcing sites I am familiar with are odesk.com (my preference), rentacoder.com and elance.com, although there are many. Rentacoder might have a slightly higher percentage of students than the other sites but I don't know.

I have been a provider on all three of those sites. In most cases, you can either specify a fixed amount you are willing to pay, or pay the service provider on an hourly basis. I avoid working for fixed fees because in my experience project posters dramatically underestimate the amount of work required and have a tendency to increase the scope of projects.

A different type of service for light and repetitive tasks is Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Source(s):
http://www.odesk.com
http://www.elance.com
http://www.rentacoder.com

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

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