I also like the metaphor of blog as space or house – when it’s working best for me that’s how it feels, and I often catch myself thinking about heading over to someone’s “place” to spend some time. Thinking about that balance between comfort, welcome, lack of clutter and cleanliness is a useful way of thinking about how things look when a new reader first pops their head round the door.

Joanna

I agree about the most popular and tags issue, however, many readers look for those for two reasons. First, they expect them to be there, whether or not they use them. Second, while they might not use them, the words in the most popular and tags provide information about the purpose of the blog, adding to the culmination of “first glance” information to help them make a decision to stay or leave.

Not every blog needs these two, but readers expect them, and this is about what the readers need, not about what the blogger “thinks” they need – a huge gap I’m trying to close.

Conversely, I’m not convinced that every blog needs to have “most popular posts” or tags. Depending on readership levels and where visitors primarily come from, a lot of people won’t care what your most popular content is. They only want what’s relevant to them. A list of popular posts *can* be useful, but it can also be a clutter.

Similarly for tags. Not every blog needs or warrants visible tags. A lot of implementations of tags (tag clouds, for example) are messy and do little to enhance the “average” visitor.

A lot of the stuff bloggers add to their blogs are things that only other bloggers really understand or use, so while they may work very well on a blog about blogging, they tend to work less well on non-tech/non metablogs.