I have written a plugin that does exactly what the blog list is doing:
http://www.weinschenker.name/plugin-feed-reading-blogroll/
Yes: Feed reading blogroll.
This plugin provides a sidebar-widget and a template-tag that add an enhanced blogroll to your sidebar. It checks on all your linked sites for which you saved a separate feed-url, when the most recent update has occured.
The age of the most recent post will be displayed under the bookmark.
As the Feed reading blogroll plugin has some limitations (sorting by date being the most obvious), I tried finding a different path. I’ve succeeded with a text widget connected to a Newsgator Headlines script.
What you need is a Newsgator account. Once you have it, add all the feeds you’d like to see in your blog list widget.
Then follow the instructions from this page.
The effect is a short script you copy and paste into a text widget.
It’s all very configurable, with variables like “feed name”, “post author”, “date” etc.
Hey,
check out my latest version in development. It now features the missing sorting-ability.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/230998
