Gadling

Forget about swanky hotels and posh villas -- why not travel the world visiting normal rooms? It's now possible to take a virtual journey this way, thanks to the folks behind Normal Room, a design inspired photo database of homes from around the world. The goal behind this project is to showcase personal interior design from all corners of the globe. Submit pixs of your favorite rooms, and garner design ideas from other savvy stylists.

This is another one of those quirky social networking experiments -- a community project highlighting the differences and similarities in architecture and home decoration between people in different countries. What does a lounge look like in Buenos Aires? Or an average dining room in China? Or an ordinary living room in Japan? It's definitely a cool way to gather design ideas for your own home improvement projects.

And I think the folks at Couchsurfing should team up with these guys. I'm envisioning some sort of partnership in which users could search for available couches and the results page would then feature photos and links to normal rooms - and normal couches - from around the world.