New Item Indicator on Categories and Listings

I may be asking about something someone else has brought up before, but I couldn't find it in a search so here goes. Basically I would like a small indicator graphic maybe only 10 x 10 px (Might say NEW! or something) that appears beside category name in the sidebox if there are new items in that category. There would also be an additional smaller indicator next to the subcategory(s) (if any) that contains the new items.
Taking it one step further, I think it would be also neat if there was a little indicator graphic that appeared on the category listing page next to the item(s) that were new. I realize that the 'Newest' Products listing is for this very thing, but sometimes customers don't navigate the way zen-cart thinks they should and they begin searching endlessly looking for new stuff. We add 30-100 new products a month and have many frequent customers who have implied they have trouble navigating the mass of items.
What I have found so far is there is a little option within the categories sidebox template that you can uncomment to cause a category to use a different class in the stylesheet. ( I guess they intended it to be used for like holiday coloring or something for the link, I used it to give the link right padding and background image with right attachment and I used that small image which effectively does what I mentioned in the first paragraph, however it's a manual thing I would have to change every month or so. It seems that somehow I could use this method with some sort of trigger like the one the 'Newest Products' link/center box uses so that it's automated. Like an if/then statement that says effectively 'If $categoryid has new products, use this link class' Does anyone with some mad PHP skills have a suggestion?

Sorry for the long post, hopefully it makes sense. Maybe this is more of a feature request or potential contribution, but it's something I've been trying to work out.

This is similar to a feature request/proposal that has been made before, and would certainly be a good thing to implement.

Another, possibly more flexible, way to work it might be to use the "new products" flag to add a little gif to the end of the category name display when appropriate. THis could also be applied to other display situations where a background image would not work so well.

The interesting part will be getting the new products flag set in the first place. I have a feeling it would be similar in scope to the category product count, which is a notorious resource hog.

I think it would be good to keep the broader picture in mind when developing this - the ability to selectively add a little flag/icon in various places can be used for a large number of purposes, and a function that does this, when activated by one of a number of special-purpose alerting functions which says "use this image now", would be a great boon to the system in general.

I'm actually also looking for this, if it's possible.