SoundTransit takes you travelling like Wayfaring, but the journey is for your ears. SoundTransit is a collaborative community dedicated to sharing field recordings and phonography from around the world — folks who've recorded ambient sound from their environments in different locations across the globe upload their often wonderfully unintentional soundscapes for others to share. On the site you can book audio "journeys" by selecting a start point, end point and how many "stopovers" you'd like. The result is a mashed up MP3 file you can download or play in your browser which contains sounds from points along the path, each with an attendant description and artist information. Everything is Creative Commons Attribution licensed, so remixing and reuse is encouraged with attribution to the contributing phonographer. This site is a very well done execution of a great idea, and will end up having an appeal beyond the already active global phonography community.

[Via LiveWeb]

It only seems logical there would be a collaborative effort to add a folksonomy component to world mapping — enter Tagzania. Whereas 43places is more travel-oriented, focused on photos and user experience and stories of places, Tagzania makes use of the Google maps API to actually add tags to the maps themselves — so you can set a waypoint and tag it up. Each waypoint then becomes a "page" with an RSS feed, to track what other users add over time. All content submitted becomes open content under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

[Via Smartmobs]

As a travel buff, I'm digging on the new 43places social travel site, done by the 43things Robot Co-op folks. It's yet another Ruby on Rails site, cleanly designed and easy to use, and has the potential to become quite addictive. You can specify the places on your travel wishlist and find out what others have said about those locations, as well as flag the places you've been and rate them, relate an experience, and upload photos. There's also a — bless them — folksonomy component for tagging places, and a whole myriad of ways to find people you might want to connect with — because they're geographically close to you, they live in the places you want to go, or they want to go to the same places you do. Another way cool feature is that if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them with place names and use a Creative Commons license, 43places will pick them up via the magic that is web services. Now if you'll pardon me, I'm off to keep procrastinating feeding my wanderlust. See you in Tibet!