One thing I like that Dave Winer does on his blog is have posts listed chronologically for any given day - you start the day at the top and read down in time order. We read top to bottom normally so it's natural.
So I've been toying with the idea of a "Today" page to list just the posts from, well, today in chronological order then, maybe, having it as the front page of the blog.
It's easy enough to create a custom WP_Query to do this but I use a plugin to control post excerpt appearance which doesn't seem to want to play with a page based on a custom page template.
It looks as though you can't use pre_get_posts to target a specific page so a custom query appears to be the only way.
I'll keep digging for a solution.