one of my daily reads Jim Romensko's obscure store just moved from being an independently designed newsite to a typepad blog. this struck me immediately as a devaluation of the site because it had become 'just another blog', whereas before It was a uniquely designed news-site that people had to visit to read. In that they had to visit it to read it, it was experienced as a whole, and its parts were always in relation to one another as organized on the page, which gave some added value. designwise i think the argument is obvious and has been made many times about the 'value-added' of good design and layout, however, the thing with blogs is that we can read them via rss and we never need to see the original design at all, or perhaps we need to see it once in a while, but certainly not every day. Also, when blogs are read via rss, they parts need not be read in direction relation to each other as a whole, but can be read mixed with unlimited other blog-feeds, in the romenesko case, i think this lowers the overall sense of irony and humor involved. I'm wondering if other people are exploring this aspect of perceived value in blogging as compared to other online media, and if so, are there any studies available, and if not, would someone be interested in working on developing a project in this direction.