Xearth...

[ffutures]

is a nice little Windows program that puts a globe of the earth or an orthographic map onto the desktop, updates it as often as you like (showing day/night etc in real time), and plots the most recent earthquakes on it, getting data on-line, again as often as you like. The amazing thing about it is that it does all this in less than 200k! Oh, and it's free and isn't adware or spyware.

http://www.hewgill.com/xearth/

I think there's also a Linux version, but I've only experience of the Windows implementation.