Check out What’s Up?, a novel flash-based visualization tool for news. As events make it into the global news stream they’re plotted visually onto a map of the world that’s broken up into regions. Mouseover a region when you notice an event occurring and you get a quick summary and can click through to the story, or turn on the balloons and the headline will pop up for big stories. This is pretty cool, though I found the balloons distraction more than helpful. This would make a perfect widget for osx too.

[via metafilter]