http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2008/12/13-characteristics-of-outstanding-blog-design/

we used Technorati Top Blogs and analyzed 50 most popular blogs which appear there. It doesn’t really matter if the Technorati list is correct or not — we wanted to find out what design solutions big players (aka most popular blogs) prefer.

1. Layout

Let us start with the analysis of the layouts used on the most popular blogs in the blogosphere. Are there more 2-column-layouts than 3-column-layouts? Are layouts centered? Are they fixed, fluid or elastic? Are tables still used? In this section we are going to answer all these questions.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/24/a-small-study-of-big-blogs/