I'm playing with a WordPress plugin called AsideShop - it lets you define a category to be handled as "asides" and provides a way to override the post display template so you can make them look however you want. The cool thing is - you can define post templates for each category on your site, if that kind of thing floats your boat. Very cool. But, I do need to figure out how to exclude items in the Asides category from the main site feed...