New Travel Sites: Jogging Maps, Cooking Schools and Tourist Echoes

I am not one to do that urban jogging thing. You know, where you put on shorts and run past startled people having a coffee in elegant cafes. Still, you might be loath to give up sweating profusely on your vacation and you might not know where the best routes are. Well, MapMyRun is a new site where folks upload maps of their favorite runs. You can search for Paris, France, for example and then choose to follow the 7 mile hill run of Sarah. Watch out for those hills though, Sarah is a glutton for punishment.

Cooking in Italy is a guide to choosing the right cooking school while you're on your Italian vacation. "Cook with love - cook with your soul" is the motto of Franco, who cooks in Le Marche. I tried it, but the meat balls kept falling out because my soul didn't have a lid.

"Woices is a free internet service that allows people to create, share and consume echoes: audio records which are linked to a very specific geographical location or real world object. Woices ultimate goal is to extend reality by creating a new layer of oral information, what we call the echoesphere, that will make the world a more interesting place, by extracting histories and pieces of information that is not possible to find in the tourist guides."

I haven't had a chance to play with woices much, but it's an interesting idea. Listen to the intro and try to add some English echos to a mainly Spanish language echo-sphere right now.

Happy travels.