I first came across the site only today, when an old friend, the perennial exile activist and writer Sokari Ekine, tweeted a blog post on the site, which she'd been using as an antidote to living in Florida. (My words, not hers.)

"I started to wish I was back on Kilburn High Road recording the late night rats in the garbage from Nandos, the drunks coming out of the pubs, sirens all day long, endless chatter and traffic, kids playing - well screaming in the park, couples fighting, youths dealing, singing beer drinking out of town football fans from strange places like Wigan and Stoke City, and my own music trying to silence all these external noises and the neighbour shouting and banging on my wall trying to silence me."

The spread of cities represented in this first open-source, crowdsourced database of found city-sounds and maps is remarkable. The listener can travel from Tokyo, Japan to Belo Horizonte in Brazil, from Granada, Spain to Bamako in Mali. The maps lean toward Europe and Latin America with an emphasis on larger population areas. Hopefully, with the crowdsourcing element fully engaged it will get more from Africa and from rural areas.

You can also search for cities based on quality keywords, like "beat," "birds," "churches," "industrial" and "weather."

Sonicity

Sonicity is an on-site sound mixer that allows the listener to pluck and mix cities, individual sounds, pretty much anything in the database.

Users have also utilized the database to create music. Stanza has composed a musical "world tour" and released it as an MP3 download called Soundcities CD.

The experience and possibilities inherent in the project are pretty intuitive, but here's Stanza's take on the experiment.

"(S)ounds...give clues to the emotional and responsive way we interact with our cities. Cities all have specific identities, and found sound can give us clues to the people that inhabit these spaces, as well as provoking us and stimulating our senses in a musical way. I am interested in the sounds of specific places, and how the sounds reflect this identity and re-imposes characteristics back onto the location or environment."

Stanza's experiments may have been among the first, but are not the only. Among the others are the British Library's UKSOUNDMAP and the BBC's Save Our Sounds project.

What's your experience with capturing and interpreting sounds online? What sources and tools do you use? Where do you post the results? Let us know in the comments.

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Other sources: Intersections, Weird Vibrations, Oso

It is also noteworthy that Stanza has been a proponent of open eBook standards like EPUB, while Amazon has always kept its system relatively closed. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Lexcycle announced that it was working together with Adobe to develop an open standard for eBook catalogs, which would make it easier for smaller publishers to offer their books through applications like Stanza (or even the Kindle, if Amazon incorporated this standard).

Overall, this seems like a curious acquisition by Amazon. With the Kindle iPhone app, its hardware eBook reader and its content partners, Amazon could easily compete with Stanza. It will be interesting to see how Amazon will manage to bring the two teams together and what it plans to do with Stanza in the long run. We can only assume that Amazon won't be interested in developing and supporting two different eBook readers.

OPML for eBooks

One way to think about this standard is as a kind of 'OPML for eBooks' - only instead of RSS feeds, OPDS features a catalog of eBooks, including optional links to book covers and short summaries. Instead of making users jump through all kinds of hoops, eBook applications could simply allow users to 'subscribe' to and search through these catalogs from within the application - and users could then download them right to their eBook readers without having to go to a browser or another application first.

In a perfect world, where every eBook vendor adopted this standard, users would be able to find and acquire books from any device, whether it be a Kindle, a Sony Reader, a Windows Mobile phone, or a Windows desktop. The Stanza reader, for example, already features support for various stores, and if Amazon adopted this standard, it could easily enable its users to access any other OPDS enabled store. The experience would probably not be as rich as on a dedicated app or website, but it would allow users to access eBooks from a wider range of vendors (which, of course, might not necessarily be in every vendor's interest).

Just a draft for now

The OPDS standard is currently in draft form, but the core elements of the standard are support for the EPUB standard and the Atom XML based catalog format. The exact specifications are available on the project's wiki, where you can also participate in the project.

In his post about this announcement, Adobe's Bill McCoy argues that he hopes that this standard will give consumers a seamless mechanism to get eBooks from various sources, with the ability to read the texts on multiple devices, "without lock-in to 'One Store to Rule Them All'" - which we take as a reference to Amazon's Kindle and Kindle Store (though thanks to this hack, reading ePub books on the Kindle has now become a bit easier).

McCoy also rightly argues that having a standard for eBook distribution and acquisition will allow vendors to reach more consumers across a wider range of platforms, which, in the end, can only be a good thing for the emerging eBook market.

What is Bookworm?

Bookworm is an online service for storing and reading eBooks online. Bookworm was built on top of the ePub standard, an open standard for electronic books that is currently supported by a number of commercial publishers, including Penguin Books, Waterstone's, O'Reilly, Books on Board, and a number of smaller publishers and free eBook sites.

How to Get Started with Bookworm

To get started with Bookworm, you will need some ePub books to upload to the service. If you don't have any on your computer yet, here is Waterstone's version of President Obama's Inaugural Address, or you can also head to Munseys for a large selection of pulp fiction (just make sure you select EPUB as the download format).

After that, you just have to upload the epub file to Bookworm and you can start reading the book online.

Mobile Reading

The Bookworm interface is sparse, but it does the job. One of the advantages of reading these books online however, is that they are available wherever you go, including your phone, and in many ways, the reading experience is actually better on a small screen than on the desktop.

The nice feature about keeping these books online is that Bookworm always knows what page you were on the last time you opened the book, no matter what device you used. This way, it can easily take you right back to where you left off.

Read in Stanza

If you using an iPhone, you can even automatically move your books from Bookworm directly to Stanza, the popular eBook reader. Just click on the "Read in Stanza" icon and the book is immediately transferred to Stanza, though you can't sync your book back to Bookworm from Stanza.

Logo image used courtesy of Flickr user Sara Alfred