Dashboardy Home Page; Custom View of the Feed

Maybe I just need to get used to the idea of the home page being a running collaborative blog of sorts, but once it's really active it seems like it'll suffer from Twitter-syndrome where you see what's recent, not necessarily what's interesting or important.

I'd make one column/container be the "what people are talking about right now" feed, then have the option to set up other buckets for things like "in order by # of comments" and "in order by number of views." Then the ability to create custom containers that display packaged search results.