Free Web Services??
I think it'd be great if there was a hosted repository of web services that you could hit up for free.
If I were to make one...
It'd be hosted and allow a certain number of requests/hour, in the ballpark of 100. It'd be hosted by Merb, be heavily cached, and have certain plugins available like hpricot for parsing HTML and XML. Finally, it'd be able to serve up resutls in HTML, XML, JSON, or YAML.
Each service made would have to be reviewed by me before getting public access. Anyone would be able to contribute to the site, though that might be somewhat complicated. Additionally, heavy users could be charged minor sums in order to get more use out of the site. A small premium could even be charged for the benefit of the person who put together the site (me) and possibly the person who wrote the service. Later on, there could be more computationally intensive services, like converting a .doc or .txt into a .pdf.