The 2nd site you list is using a portal that's connected to a forum.
They make the posts in a section of the forum which the portal uses to display new messages.
In other words the portal is told to look in forum A for new posts, when it finds one it displays it on the portal.
You can configure the portal to look in more than one forum for messages, you can also decide how many messages are posted on the portal.
If you have MySQL and PHP installed on your server then you can do this.
You can find free forum software here:
www.phpbb.com
You can find a free portal system compatible with above software here:
http://smartor.is-root.com/downloads/ezportal_v218.zip
The portal is fully customisable, you could even hide the forum and simply keep the portal (like a weblog).
I'm using both software systems and you can see the result here:
www.alhaffar.com/forum/ (about a year ago i was a complete newb who didn#t know anything about forums, php or mysql. I learnt everything as i went along by trial and error).