I was a bit disappointed here. Everyone mentioned going through hundreds of blogs, but then discussion was either about the “philosophy” of customizing your blog (whuzzuh??) or a tortuous demo of not new stuff (seriously, how to make a blog roll?). My ideal? Lets spend some time talking about the philosophy. Dunstan made some great points about just noticing the annoying things on other people’s sites to improve your own, but then, lets go through like 20 or 30 blogs and point out the neat things or the different ways to go about things.

I guess what I wanted just wasn’t what they were doing. Still, if I were doing a trick-out your blog panel, I’d definitely try to highlight the “this is so fuckin cool” feature list. Here’s a few off-the-top-of-the-head picks:

• Kottke.org – yeah, I’m lame, but like Paul, I’m totally hot on the single timeline… It’s so the future.
• Erik Benson – the moraleometer rocks, as does the whole erikkgregator thing. Again, it’s the future
• Subtraction – beautifully designed, and quite functional. I like the category map, the star rankings, the org, all of it (damn, Khoi was at SXSW?)
• unfoldedorigami – this was the first site I saw doing LiveSearch
• urlgreyhot – Michael Angeles’ site has undergone a redesign from the one I fell in love with, but this and all the Drupal sites represent a different type of blogging. (see also: Jonas’ blog or Zack’s blog (AIM comments, insane, in all senses of the word). There’s lots of potential (especially w/ how nodes can be re-ordered and grouped — more about this soon)
• FTrain – probably not as interesting from a Geegaws point of view, it’s all about the geekage (ontology building baby)
• Fiftyfoureleven.com – this is a new redesign, and I’m loving the layout, very well thought out structure. Similar in the direction that Dave or Scrivs (layout since changed)
• On the plain clever design front, Andy Budd, Shaun Inman, Dave, Ryan, and of course Dunstan have all been doing neat things w/ comment numbering, real-time previews, etc. etc.
• bigempty – and now for something completely different