Within an article-oriented page (such as a blog post), the element (level 1 heading) is commonly used to markup either:
On Wikipedia the h1-Tag contains the article-name and headings in the document start with h2. The name Wikipedia is part of the title-tag in the html-header. I also think that's the way to go. So for blogs I would do like Joel Spolsky in the examples you have given.
And I would always start with the highest level, so letting out h1 is in my opinion a bad option.