I used that to make a demo for my realtime collaborative editing library:<p><a href="http://sharejs.org/wiki/HackerNews" rel="nofollow">http://sharejs.org/wiki/HackerNews</a><p>The rendered markdown updates live for you and everyone else viewing the page!
Showdown's a great library, I use it with some tweaks on <a href="http://notepag.es/" rel="nofollow">http://notepag.es/</a> for doing markdown/latex math editing. Given it is just a chain of regexes though, modifying it to add new functionality can be a little hairy.
Reminds me of <a href="http://showdown.im" rel="nofollow">http://showdown.im</a> , which I've been using up until recently. I know they both use the same library, but this one looks like it has syntax highlighting.
Based on the underlying library, I created this wysiwyg-ish editor a while back: <a href="http://troelskn.github.com/upflow/" rel="nofollow">http://troelskn.github.com/upflow/</a>