These are all great applications for the aiosphere system:

A Make magazine blog entry shows a nice gizmo that turns on an LED backlight behind a series of little pictures of friends, so the user can see at a glance who’s online. Used VB or similar.

Another Make post, this one about an ambient orb made from an ikea lamp. Notable for use of an Ethernet connection.

Another Arduino ambient orb, this one USB.

Here is video of a news feed scroller which uses a WizNet ethernet chip. Here is a PDF abstract of the project.

Here is a Stock Clock project which uses Zigbee modules, useful for looking at the overall structure of the type of system I am describing.