"blog it" for other node types

I've been searching around but couldn't find much on this.

I'm interested in converting the 'blog this' function, which allows users with access to blog.module to create new nodes from aggregator links, to a more generalised function. There seems like a few possibilities for it though, and I'm not a coder, so thought it'd be worth posting this to keep track of ideas and see if anyone else has done or is trying to do the same thing:

Most of the relevant code is here in blog.module

/**
 * Implementation of hook_form().
 */
function blog_form(&$node) {
  global $nid;
  $iid = $_GET['iid'];


  if (empty($node->body)) {
    /*
    ** If the user clicked a "blog it" link, we load the data from the
    ** database and quote it in the blog:
    */

    if ($nid && $blog = node_load($nid)) {
      $node->body = '<em>'. $blog->body .'</em> ['. l($blog->name, "node/$nid") .']';
    }

    if ($iid && $item = db_fetch_object(db_query('SELECT i.*, f.title as ftitle, f.link as flink FROM {aggregator_item} i, {aggregator_feed} f WHERE i.iid = %d AND i.fid = f.fid', $iid))) {
      $node->title = $item->title;
      // Note: $item->description has been validated on aggregation.
      $node->body = '<a href="'. check_url($item->link) .'">'. check_plain($item->title) .'</a> - <em>'. $item->description .'</em> [<a href="'. check_url($item->flink) .'">'. check_plain($item->ftitle) ."</a>]\n";
    }

  }

  $form['title'] = array('#type' => 'textfield', '#title' => t('Title'), '#required' => TRUE, '#default_value' => $node->title, '#weight' => -5);
  $form['body_filter']['body'] = array('#type' => 'textarea', '#title' => t('Body'), '#default_value' => $node->body, '#rows' => 20, '#required' => TRUE);
  $form['body_filter']['filter'] = filter_form($node->format);
  return $form;
}

and this bit in aggregator which generates the link

 if ($user->uid && module_exist('blog') && user_access('edit own blog')) {
    if ($image = theme('image', 'misc/blog.png', t('blog it'), t('blog it'))) {
      $output .= '<div class="icon">'. l($image, 'node/add/blog', array('title' => t('Comment on this news item in your personal blog.'), 'class' => 'blog-it'), "iid=$item->iid", NULL, FALSE, TRUE) .'</div>';
    }
  }

The things I'd like to be able to do are this:

1. "discuss this article" link on different drupal node types, which create a forum post with a link to the article and/or the teaser. We've got busy forums and would rather keep comments there rather than enabling comments on nodes everywhere else which can be hard to keep track of.

2. Converting aggregator items into news nodes - I understand the "aggregator 2" module does this but haven't tried that yet

For number 1, it seems like it'd be easy enough to hack that blog.module code and add it to forum.module, then insert the code into other node displays on the theme level with maybe with a .tpl.php?

I think what'd be a bit more tidy would be to add a link into the service links module:

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/service_links...

that makes drupal posts using the blog_form code. That'd give a lot of flexibility with display etc.

Or maybe build a new module from scratch that adds this functionality. The main advantage I can see is that whereas a forum node is started with the intention of a discussion, news items (or for us, on-line library etc. entries) aren't - so when it's 2, 3, 5 years old you'd have a lot of comments not necessarily related to each other, this'd fix that.