newsmap is a visualization of Google News. It gives you headlines in color-coded bands by category, sized by how many places are reporting the same story, and shaded by age. This is information pornography of the highest order. It uses flash. It may accomplish what even Strongbad and weebl and bob have so far failed to do—get me to install Flash on my home computer.
newsmap comes from the same person who wrote social circles, which also looks interesting. I may see if I can put together something similar with Perl and Graphviz.