There has been discussion about how best to handle Featured, Staff picks, and Rumor Mill (which are three lists that will show up on the portal of the site).
After some thought, I think the following would be a more than adequate solution for this, which would make it easy to extend later on.
Delicious is a social bookmarking service. It allows anyone and everyone to bookmark their favorite sites (individual pages), and keep them on the Web. This allows for syncing between home and office computers, sharing bookmarks with your friends, etc.
If AWN were to use this service to create dynamic lists, such as Featured and Staff picks, this would be a highly extensible way to create as many lists as you'd like.
For example. If I created a function that read the bookmarks from Delicious, from AWN's account, and made it in such a way that you could send any tag to it, you'd be able to pull out any bookmarks in your account with any specific tag. So tagging a blog, or article, with "Staff Pick" would essentially add itself to that list. In the future, and this is where the extensibility comes in, if AWN wanted to add a "Kids" section to the front page where articles were highlighted that have been written specifically for children - then a tag of "Kids" could be used.
Added benefits include the ability for more than one person to use this service in-house. In fact, an entire team could share the same account and effectively keep Animation Blogspot updated continuously. Another benefit is exposure to the service. Delicious is used by a very large audience (it was recently bought by Yahoo!), so any public link will be picked up by those that use delicious, and will end up finding Animation Blogspot by Osmosis.
As an example of how Delicious is used for research, we can take a look at the animation tag. Searching for Flash animation on Delicious will give you tons of user submitted information. Hopefully Animation Blogspot will end up within those verticals in the near future.
