use <nav> for pack of links, <section> for sections and <aside> for typographical sidenotes like “By the way british scientists proved aside tag should be used only for typographical sidenotes like “By the way british scientists proved aside tag should be used only for…

the <nav> element which allows you to group together links, resulting in more semantic markup….

The search form isn’t a link, isn’t it? And let’s think about “Categories” section and “Flickr” section. Are they connected to each other? Of course NO. In my opinion the sidebar should be <section> and “Categories”, “Archive”, “Flickr”, “Blog roll” should be wrapped into separate <nav> tags. Or let’s look at CSS Tricks sidebar. Will you use <nav> tag for it? I don’t think so.

Even if we can use it, what we have in this sidebar are most probably links (to posts, to comments, to taxonomy categories etc.). So it’s definitely nav.

I think it’s better to wait while HTML5 draft will be approved, and I hope it will contain guidelines on how to use this element.

<aside>, as written there, is a semantic element that is a sort of addition to the main content. So, it won’t be a mistake to use <aside> for sidebar (which actually, depending of purpose of its creation, may be that additional material).

Categories are related to posts. Anything about the author of the posts – is related to the posts as well.

Thats the point where we think different.
I think list of blogposts and blog categories+RSS+etc are tangentially related things, and you don’t. That’s it. I just think it is a little misguiding to tell that “sidebar!=aside”.

I think when we got controversial html elements – we just have two right ways of understanding them.

P.S.: nice post btw =)

Ok, let’s talk about blog home page. The main content here is a list of latest articles (or a single latest article, but that’s not our case, right?) Archives, categories list, blogroll — are list of articles, articles, and links to other blogs respectively. Also you can find here (usually) links to RSS, top commenters, login/admin links.

So don’t you think that all these items are related to latest articles? I can agree, if you put in <aside> 5 latest commenters of each article (because they are related), excerpt from article text, any kind of meta info related to post. But links to lists of other articles is the blog navigation, <nav> element.