One of the things I was noticing in my feed aggregator was how the "visited US states" meme has been propagating into the various blogging communities I am part of. BP was nice enough to generate a thumbnail for me so that I could view this at a macroscopic level. (He used PARC's Popout Prism to quickly generate the image).

Unfortunately, there's so many other entries in the feed reader that the maps end up squashed, but if you look at the bottom, you can see the first cluster of maps, which is mine, then BP's two maps, and tonya's. After that, there is a slight lull. honeyfields and I bugged meta to do a map as well, so then you see meta's near complete map, followed by jrc's (who reads meta's blog), and ginfiend's (who also reads meta's blog). You can tell by the amount of red in the images that meta clearly wins the contest :). You can see the full feed here (link no longer valid).

As Popout Prism has this neat (and central) feature that highlights keywords in the thumbnail (example of this on the left), I was thinking that it would be interesting to integrate this feature into a feed aggregator. As people in your community start talking about visited states, orkut, or a party you went to the other day, you'd be able to quickly see how hot a particular topic was. If you aggregator was especially smart, it could show you a list of what topics seemed to be hot and let you click on them to highlight them in the thumbnail and on the page. If only there were a freely available server-side toolkit :).