I think KDE's notifier is pretty sweet. I was thinking... how useful might it be if my system logs were also sent there, so they would pop so I could see them. I think the first step of this is to figure out how to send messages to the notifier via CLI.
here's the kde forum discussion on dbus interface. I'm not really sure how to use this interface. If anyone is more familiar with dbus perhaps they can write an answer detailing various ways to access it via dbus.
qdbus org.kde.knotify /Notify event "warning" "origin" '(' ')' "title" "text" 0 0 0 0. But it produces no visible effect when I test it. – Gilles Sep 2 '10 at 22:09