• Wear Palettes
  Color palettes from photos posted to the Sartorialist (a fashion photography blog).
  (tags: color clothing weblog)
• brand tags
  (tags: advertising brand tag)
• celeb tags
  (tags: celebrity brand tag)
• Bio-debatable: Food vs. fuel
  Very interesting comparison chart. Seems like anything but corn or soybeans is the way to go.
  (tags: food environment gas)
• MPR: Budget Hero
  The next in the lineage of budget balancers. Nicely done.
  (tags: money game work)
• Newsstream
  Newsstream is an attempt to convey visually the changeable attentions of the news media.
  (tags: web google news data visualization)
• A Venezuelan Moment: The Gillmor Gang considers nationalizing Twitter
  The idea of building competitors to Twitter on the same platform, or redistributing Twitter to multiple players reminds me of the idea that New York City should be rebuilt in Ohio because it would be cheaper.
  (tags: twitter social web)

• FoodFeed - What are you eating?
  Foodfeed is a service that helps you share your eating habits with everyone, from anywhere.
  (tags: twitter share food web aggregation)
• Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media
  (tags: social web aggregation)

• Processing has been ported to JavaScript
  (tags: javascript visualization)
• Outdoor pictogram headlines // Designing The News
  (tags: news design idea)
• Real Housewives of NYC — A Lot of Them
  If you’re a married woman living in the New York City area, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that you don’t work.
  (tags: marriage money work culture nyc twincities)

• visual urban data slides (tecznotes)
  (tags: crime map data visualization)
• (The official) Tumblr Tumblelog
  (tags: tumblr weblog)
• IHT.com Developer Blog » Who says type can’t be improved on the web?
  A little regex in a template to make sure there are no text widows. Nice.
  (tags: web design typography news newspaper)

• Eric’s Archived Thoughts: The Really Perfect Ringtone
  (tags: phone music comedy)
• Helder Luis: The perfect iPhone Ringtone
  (tags: phone music)
• Indiana Jones Experiences
  Now you can recreate the Indiana Jones “red line flying to red dots” travel experience in real life.
  (tags: travel)
• Annals of Innovation: In the Air
  Who says big ideas are rare? The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
  (tags: idea invention)
• Stigler’s law of eponymy
  No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
  (tags: science invention name)
• Marginal Revolution: When should you take photographs?
  It’s all about organizing your memories in the form of narratives and that is what cameras help us do, if only by differentiating the flow of events into chunkier blocks of greater discreteness.
  (tags: photo culture memory)

• Soundamus
  Finds new and upcoming music releases from the artists you listen to based on your last.fm profile.
  (tags: music lastfm)

• Olinda (Schulze & Webb)
  (tags: bbc social radio music design)
• Acrylic | Times
  Mac RSS feed reader with a nice, clean newspaper metaphor and reading experience.
  (tags: rss web design newspaper news)

• Textism: Embedded video is broken
  A bit of a sensational headline just to say “please add a pop out function to video players”, but he is right. Hulu does this already, no?
  (tags: web video work)
• The Naked Game
  Pong as played by two artificial intelligences, with the entire code governing the mechanics of the game exposed below it which you can modify and see the effects in real time.
  (tags: art video game programming)

• Ponoko
  Armed with nothing more than an idea, professional and hobbiest designers, crafters, hackers and artists can turn their ideas into real products.
  (tags: web furniture design idea)
• Google Me: The Movie
  (tags: google movie video youtube)
• Disappearing Foods: Encouraging a Comeback - The New York Times
  North America’s gastronomic regions. It’s very true that every place in Seattle serves something with salmon, and every place in Minneapolis has something with wild rice.
  (tags: environment food map nytimes visualization)

Restaurants, residential power, water and gas, medical treatment (particularly in emergencies), manicures, pedicures, haircuts, (some) public transportation, (some) prostitutes…

Makes me wonder what the underlying thread is among all of these services. Any others to add?

It surprises me that so many transactions happen through simply trust. I’ve also seen some of these situations become awkward, like when a disheveled person gets asked to show that they have the money in advance. What’s the advantage of conducting services this way? Would paying for a meal at a sit-down restaurant in advance be so weird? Can or does this translate into the web world somehow?