Smashing Magazine present their findings of their study of top blogs.

• Part 1 discusses layout design and typographic settings.
• Part 2 discusses navigation design, information architecture, advertisements and functionality (RSS-feeds, tag clouds, pagination, etc).

What Smashing Magazine has to say about their study:

We have identified 30 design problems and considered solutions for each of the problems separately. We have posed 30 questions which we would like to answer with our blog survey. Below we present findings of our survey of popular blog designs — the results of an analysis of 50 popular blogs according to Technorati’s Top 100.

Also from Smashing Magazine is their helpful post on 15 Desktop Blogging Tools Reviewed. I actually wrote this post using BlogDesk. Not too bad, just took some getting used to. I will try ScribeFire (a Firefox plugin) for my next post.

References:

• A Small Study of Big Blogs | Smashing Magazine | Vitaly Friedman | 24 July 2008
• A Small Study of Big Blogs: Further Findings | Smashing Magazine | Vitaly Friedman | 31 July 2008
• 15 Desktop Blogging Tools Reviewed | Smashing Magazine | Glen Stansberry | 1 August 2008