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

husani

Searches various data sources (Google Blog Search and Twitter) for posts related to your content and displays links/summaries on your page or 
inside your posts. These links and summaries can be displayed anywhere and any way you wish — below your post, in a sidebar, etc. With the 
magic animation power of jQuery, SMIRC content can be hidden until a user clicks the customizable header.
SMIRC performs related content searching (at least in this version) by creating RSS feed URLs for the various data sources. The RSS feed is 
parsed and converted into XHTML for display in your blog.
All PHP is separated into logical classes and files, and all XHTML is standards-compliant. Lists of links, authors, and summaries are built 
using standard UL and LI tags, and can be modified to fit your theme via two CSS files contained within this plugin.
SMIRC is released to the WordPress community under the GPL. Please feel free to modify as you see fit, and if you find this plugin useful, donate 
to the author. All feedback is welcome at wordpressplugins@husani.com, and you can visit the author’s websites at http://www.husani.com and 
http://www.evb.com.
UPDATE FOR v1.1: Fixed a bug with setting header text.

Social Media Integrated Related Content (SMIRC)

Like trackbacks, but not -- this plugin searches and displays content related to your CONTENT, not just posts that link to yours.

Multisite Featured Blog vs Social Media Integrated Related Content (SMIRC)