I agree with this suggestion that others have made but want to re-iterate that I would love to be able to have a few feature entries that it cycles through.

I also wanted to suggest a way to put it easily into the Board index page (portal for some the actual forum for others like me) because I know there are people like me that have a Staff blog and may want important announcements known throughout the board.

I was very impressed with your staff blog idea!

I have a news and announcements forum that the board is set to show up at the top of the board index to show the latest news.
The problem is that when someone replies to an older news item, the latest news link show the old news item! That could do with being improved itself!

Perhaps you could use either the RSS export and import features to do what you want.