Chuquet, an aggregator site that I mentioned in this previous post, helps to both textually and visually track what people are linking to online. Chuquet assumes that items that are highly linked to are more important thus are part of recent online buzz. Chuquet also tracks the most popular Flickr photos, most referenced wikipedia entries and most commonly used tags.
Each tracked area can be searched and is valuable for one reason or another. My favorite area of is the 'Flickr Wall' of most popular Flickr photos as shown above. Check out Chuquet for another way to discover fresh and popular online content. Additionally, Chuquet is NOT a beta and there is something to be said for that.