Here's a neat application that creates a visual, on-the-fly map (in colour) of what the most popular stories are in the Google News Aggregator. Looks very different like this. In the words of the artist, Marcos Weskamp:

"It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

Useful, if you want to see what news is making a splash.