Using KDE notification area within a shell script gives a lot of useful possibilities as you can easily display feedback from running services, other scripts, log analyzers.
I used a shell script that takes advantage of kdialog application to create the above notification example.
#!/bin/sh
message(){
cat << EOF
Say <strong>hello</strong> using your <font color=red>nofication</font> area.
Date: `date`
Used space: `df -h | grep sda1 | awk '{ print $5 }'`
Load average: <u>`uptime | awk '{ print $10 $11 $12 }' | sed s/\,/\ /g`</u>
EOF
}
timeout=20
kdialog=$(which kdialog)
${kdialog} --passivepopup "`message`" ${timeout}