Yahoo! NewsGlobe 
Posted on February 13, 2008
See where on earth big news is breaking
http://next.yahoo.net/download/newsglobe
The Yahoo! NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Y! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information off to the Yahoo! Maps service to find a matching location, and return latitude and longitude coordinates for it. The rest is simply a matter of using the 3D classes in ActionScript to create a visually engaging experience that’s either automated or interactive.