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...said the blogazine.
I'm not saying that this is not a great idea for a new content type, but it seems to me that the intersection of people who are good at web design and people who are good at writing (about things that aren't web design) is probably a fairly small set (in comparison to the set of people who are good at writing).
You also have to notice that the signal to noise ratio in a magazine (feels to me) much higher in a traditional print medium than it is in a magazine. The text gets stretched out over a much larger area (although the trade off is worth it for magazines where the pictures help to tell the story).
A lot of the time, the design is there in order to cover up the apparent lack of information in the magazine. Have you ever read Cosmo? It is mostly full-page advertisements.
Although that does bring up the fact that you could monetize a blogazine really easily by including full-page advertisements and making it so you have to scroll through it. Imagine one of those really pretty magazine-style photo-adds on a blogazine, I would imagine that the click through rate would be pretty good, and you could charge just for showing the add.
Appearance and textual content meet somewhere (otherwise we would all be using HTML 1.1 or whatever), but I doubt we will be seeing full-blown blogazines go mainstream any time soon simply because of the technical skill involved (and how bad it will go if you don't pull it off properly).
Pah. Text is good for people who can think about what they're reading rather than what they're seeing. They are my audience (such as it is).
...said the blogazine.
It's worth noting that Smashing Magazine is not normally a full-on blogazine; only this particular article was like this. Their previous post was much more in the format of a normal blog: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/18/designing-css-but...
The best way to present information is not always text on plain background. This should be obvious for anybody who has had to visualize data to make it understandable. The blogazine idea carries data visualization forward from quantitative to something more qualitative.
This is a great idea if you're a designer and know what you're doing. I shudder at the thought of how appalling my personal website would look - think geocities at its worst! - if I tried this. Conventions may be boring, but they allow us design duffers to focus on the content itself.
I really like the way they are presenting information -- there really is a problem on the web of nav-on-the-top-and-left, ads-on-the-right, boring presentation and it's good to see someone trying other things. Having said that, I don't think they got it quite right wrt the scrolling/page-down flow. I'd like to see something like this that was a bit more screen orientated. Their example is more like something I like to see on a tall poster and doesn't fit screen browsing quite right. I don't know what the answer looks like though.