It's been around for a while, but a lot of people still haven't experienced it - The Quiet American's One-Minute Vacations Site. It's an expanding collection of user submitted 60-second audio samples from around the world. Absolutely fascinating to listen to, and many of them really do take you there. Take a minute break and go on a vacation.

While people often use the term "Audio Blogging" to refer to the spoken word (which, when fed through RSS, becomes podcasting), I see these sort of audio samples to be more analogous - though in the audio realm - to photo blogging. As much as I appreciate the Quiet American, it would be interesting to have a site like Flickr-for-audio-samples, with thousands or millions of samples from around the world. Heck, maybe just the Flickr we know and love, but with the addition of audio. It would be interesting to see photos of an Indian market, coupled with some audio samples, and be able to search and browse by keywords.

Of course naturally one would think "Duh...that's video with audio...That's Google Video", however video remains too unwieldy, and in the hands of a less-than-expert it very seldom captures the essence of a scene like a carefully taken photo does, nor does it facilitate quick and easy consumption.