Man, getting fired can be great for your creativity and productivity. At least that’s what I’m learning from my friend Jeff Reifman these days.

Jeff’s been on creative streak lately, playing with a bunch of permutations at the fertile intersection of social networks, alternative media, progressive activism and emerging tech. His latest creation, CommonTimes is “a social bookmarking community for news readers” and I think it’s quite amazing.

If you’re already familiar with social software, CommonTimes is basically “del.icio.us for news stories.” For the less-techie among us, CommonTimes lets you quickly “tag” news stories on the web into its database. Your stories are combined with those of all the other users of the system to produce a news service that reflects the aggregated wisdom of its users. Simple, but very powerful.

CommonTimes produces a wide variety of RSS feeds, including:

• Feeds for each individual user, which makes it a quick and easy way to “reblog” stuff

• Feeds for each “topic” (tag) in the system, which make it easy to form only-the-fly “news communities” — for example I could quickly find all news that CommonTimes users have tagged as being about “Seattle“.

I think that the killer feature will be the ability to join groups of users, and to see the aggregated news from those groups. The collective judgement of all CommonTimes users is interesting, but the collective judgement of everyone who self identfies, say, as a “Northwest environmentalist” or a “nonprofit technologist” is even more interesting and useful. I’ve already spoken to Jeff about this, and he promises me that it’s on his roadmap as the CommonTimes community grows.

And Jeff, I also think it would be smart to include the domain of the news story in the RSS entry for each story — I’d like to see the source along with the headline.