At Twin Cities Maker a few of our members are undergoing a project to turn these into a large color changing glass block wall. It's been a pretty cool project to watch.
We used shiftbrites in our 7x8 window at Hive13 adnd it worked out very nicely. Last week we got it working with OSC and Processing - http://www.hive13.org/?p=527 - which should make connecting to it with a wide variety of software pretty easy.