This reminds me of a background display in the villain's office in a James Bond movie. A real-time view of blog posts on a spinning globe visualization. All that's missing is the holographic display that projects the globe above the coffee table.
This is a visualization of blog traffic from the Swedish social media analysis firm Primelabs, based on data from their Twingly blog search engine (via visualcomplexity). The real application for Twingly is discovering blog links for newspaper clients, but the visualization is fun (see the demo video).
As for the villain's lair—fire up Twingly, put a Digg visualization on another screen, add a real-time weather map, FlightAware and a few competing news channels (preferably international), and you've got Global Command Center 2.0.
Except Twingly doesn't run on my Mac. I guess world domination will have to wait.
