"promoted" news feed and community contributions

Hey all, just pondering some things I've noticed on other sites that helps promote community interaction with the 'mainstream' users whom visit the site, usually via the front page (I presume is where they land?)

A lot of sites nowadays have a procedure whereby they 'promote' certain posts and topics that are deemed noteworthy to a front page 'blog' style feed, whereby people can subscribe to just this feed to get what the kineme community deems the most noteworthy, as well as giving people something to strive for in terms of publicity and 'karma/kudos' for their hard work on their compositions.

Sites that sprint to mind are reddit.com but to a more extent lesswrong.com, and also the http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ site which I've been frequenting.

It gives casual visitors a 'peek' into the active forum side of things, and could possibly even give a peak into the mailing lists, if they were front end friendly enough :)

It's possible that you want to keep the kineme.net front page for official contributions only, and that's cool if you do, but knowing a composition might get promoted to the front page I think would be good motivation for people to share their hardwork.

Also, small competitions, of the sort that are at the Ludum Dare site, or the NanoWrimo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) ilk. And with these comps you could do what the Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) creators do, and make versions of your plugins (eg. the paid ones) that don't expire during the trial/competition period to give people a REAL taste of what they do, maybe even giving full versions of them to the winners.

Again... just ideas. My brain is in overflow mode.