April 5th 2006 is the first annual Naked CSS Day, wherein a slew of sites are removing CSS styles completely. It's an interesting test of how strong your markup is, and perhaps somewhat sobering for me here at web-graphics, where it's been much too long since the last re-tooling.
In 2002-2004, almost every blog had his own "Steal These Buttons" buttons:
The good: the buttons represented otherwise boring or hard to find metadata in a stylish way.
The bad: the buttons were absolutely overused, up to the point where people stopped including them in their blog templates.
From 2004 (?) on, we've seen the rise of the "add to [insert online feed reader here]" type of buttons, which are vaguely inspired by the "Steal These Buttons" design, but usually have a plus sign on the left, corporate logo on the right, and a 1px dropshadow.
The good: can't think of anything, except maybe that they might have helped RSS/Atom to become a bit more mainstream.
The bad: they're close to useless - potential subscribers will probably use their feed reader's "subscribe to" bookmarklet, a plugin or their reader's interface and don't need all those links to third-party services.
Since last year, there's a third variant of visual noise appearing on blogs: the social bookmark service icons above or below individual entries. And yes, there's even a WP plugin for it: Sociable.
The good: suggestions, anybody?
The bad: they're absolutely useless - people using social bookmarking services such as Digg, del.icio.us or Furl usually know how to add items to their accounts and don't need your favicons. Absolutely not.
The ugly: it just hurts the eyes!