Abbas S

This plugin helps to create a widget and shortcode to create featured blogs.
Following are the things done
A settings page created for featured. 
You can enter the blog id in the blog id: text box in the settings page and click on get blog details button . 
This will fetch( by AJAX ) get the blog name , blog link , and blog Avatar ( based on the avatars plugin ). 
It will also add two buttons 
 Add this blog -> Which will add this blog to the featured blog list 
Can -> it will not add the blog to the featured blog list. 
Then saving the settings will save it. The settings are saved different for each blog . 
Then the user can use the widget as follows . 
Drag the widget on a widgetize area. 
Enter the blogids in the widget , then those blogs will be used as featured blogs. 
If nothing is entered in the bloglist the blog list from the settings will be taken. 
The user can use the short code as follows
The user can specify the blog list in short code argument. For e.g:- [multisite_featured_blogs blogids=”3,2″].The those blogs will be displayed in the featured blog list. 
If the user passes no argument then in case the featured blog list will be taken from the settings. For e.g:- [multisite_featured_blogs]
This plugin was done as a part of some work done for http://premium.wpmudev.org/ , but was later not released. 
Thanks for all the help for this plugin from WPMU Dev

Multisite Featured Blog

This plugin helps to create a widget and shortcode to create featured blogs

fusionstream

blogsiread is a highly customisable widget inspired by Blogger’s “Blogs I Read” function that takes excerpts from other blogs (via Links) and displays them in a small widget on your blog.
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Change widget title</li>
<li>Automatically selects blogs from “Links” based on “Categories”</li>
<li>Optional – Show Site Title (either from link name or meta tags)</li>
<li>Optional – Show Post Title</li>
<li>Optional – Show Post Excerpt (250 characters max, plain text)</li>
<li>Optional – Order listing by “as ordered in Links page”, Post Published Date, Link Name, Site Title, Post Title. All can be additionally sorted in descending or ascending order.</li>
<li>Clicking on entries can open in a new window or in the same window</li>
<li>You can customise your widget by adding a css class.</li>
</ul>
<h4>TODO</h4>
<ul>
<li>More customisable layout</li>
<li>Limit total entries and more importantly, before loading their xml-s</li>
<li>Complete or co-operative ajax to reduce server load and more importantly, page loading times</li>
<li>Make the category selector look pretty</li>
<li>Allow customisable Post Excerpt character limit</li>
<li>Do that cool thing where the widget title in the admin page is “blogsiread: “</li>
</ul>
For those who are using a custom CSS Class, structure of widget content is as follows (some lines may not be displayed at all depending on widget options – see #): 
 
 # <a rel=”sitetitle”….</a> OR if site url is blank: 
 # <a rel=”posttitle”….</a> OR if post url is blank: 
 # …CONTENT… 
 …TIME…

blogsiread

Displays user-definable content from other blogs (via wordpress Links [RSS]) as a widget in your blog in a highly customisable format.

Multisite Featured Blog vs blogsiread