Nick Hodges has a great point. I've seen that abused at a lot of companies. "Wow, they somehow managed to squeeze 2 minutes of information into one hour!"

Congrats, Jeff! It's been a really exciting to watch StackOverflow grow from an idea to an important part of how deveopers work and communicate. It's a tribute to how well StackOverflow / StackExchange are constructed that the design holds the DNA, and you can move on to new things. Congrats on nearly doubling your family in one go, too!

There was an algorithmic thing back in 2006 that included TrustRank. While it wasn't exactly a social recommendation type of thing, it did distribute GoogleJuice based on links from trusted sources. http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/01/11/435076.aspx If there's an element of TrustRank in the current algorithms, it seems like that probably needs both a reset and a higher weighting.

Other folks have pointed to it already, but you should check out dotless. The t4 templates can auto-run when you save the .less file to compile the .css files, so there's no additional step - you just write your .less file and it just works.