I just spent a while listening to all the different accents spread across the US on the Speech Accent Archive. This site features speakers from all over the country reading a single paragraph to highlight their different accents. It's fascinating to hear the Texan and the Quebecois along side each other.
When I first heard about this site I was real excited and must say it lived up to its potential. But wouldn't it be nice to a crowd-sourced approach to this project. You could ask people to read the same phrases and then upload their sounds to a community site. You could even track things about people's heritage. After all my accent is a mixture of splitting my life three ways between Tennessee, Texas, and now Minnesota.
Via stalking Zooey Deschanel