I really like the bokeh style of blurred photography. (Ex: 1, 2, 3)

As for just running a Gaussian blur on your images, like with ImageMagick, I decided to start experimenting. The results are pretty good if you like the color palette of your image and want to minimize distraction, but the colors are about all that is preserved from the original image. You could blur it less so you still see the general shapes, but I found this to look pretty ugly, to be honest.

Here's an example of my before and after using 512x256 on ImageMagick's convert -blur command.



My impression is that this could have potential if you wrote a little script to switch between the blurred and original image whenever you want. So if you're just browsing online, you can use the original and enjoy your wallpaper's beauty, but switch it to a blurred version when you really want everything but your work to fade away.