I know they are not the only ad size used, but they are common, clearly work, they fit well and say blog to me.

You may be right about the RSS buttons annoying some people, but I would say that if you did leave them out, you’d have far fewer subscribers no matter what your audience is.

For instance, I know that I’ve never subscribed to a blog through the autodiscovery link in the URL bar. I don’t click anything without reading the URL in my browser’s status bar, so I always look for an RSS link on the actual page.

About the RSS buttons: Actually I recently read somewhere that they annoy quite a couple of readers immensely.
So even if you want to appear like a blog, you might consider leaving them out… On the other hand that does depend on your audience: If you have a techie kind of blog, then you should believe that your readers can find your RSS feed without the big ‘Subscribe’ button.

But you make a good point about sitemaps. I do find them useful, especially when organized by category. Pro Blog Design will be getting one eventually, but maybe when we have more articles to list?

I guess sitemaps are actually something very new to blogs. We’ve probably seen them on large static websites and wondered why we’d want to use them. Due to the out-of-the-box nature of many blogs (because not all bloggers are HTML and server-side software gurus) people wouldn’t even think to add them in. However, they can be quite useful for search engines and readers. Like on Vikiworks I can just scan the sitemap and get a better idea of what he likes and writes about. I also have one, it seems like only two people have looked at it in the last couple of months, but that’s cool. Looking at it now I wonder if I should separate the blog posts up into categories like Yichi does.
Anywho, my point is that perhaps sitemaps should become a more common and noticeable feature of blogs. I think they’re cool.