[font color=\'#000000\']I meter the way Guy suggests, while realizing that different media behave differently at the extremes.
When shooting negatives, which hold onto highligts well, overexposing a bit is a good way to get more shadow detail.
When shooting reversal film, which blow out highlights easily, underexposing a bit will preserve a scene with clouds.
When shooting digital, RAW format preserves more sensor information than .jpg, so I will, when worried about it, shoot RAW and let the camera meter automatically. It's the lazy-man's method, but it works most of the time. When shooting .jpg's (because of space limitations in my card) I pay a bit more attention to the histogram after each shot, and when it doesn't look right I'll either adjust the camera settings or wait for better light. I always get better results when I wait for better light.
Modern cameras do a very good job of interpreting the exposure of a scene, even handling the oddball exposures (looking into a sunset, backit subjects, etc.) better than a lot of photographers with a manual meter. The things they won't do is the more artistic interpretations of a scene. Camera's don't know if you want a low-key or a high-key effect, they only know middle gray. So if you want an artistic effect, and you want your camera to do the metering, you need to know how to alter the exposure (+/- ev, spotmeter, different shooting modes maybe) to get the effect you are after.
Or you need to know how to do it later in photoshop when working with the RAW file.
Note that most points I've made here are fundamental philosophies of L-L, easily gleaned by reading the continuous stream of articles on the front page, so I don't expect I'm telling you much you haven't heard before.
As for my own style, I spotmeter first to see the light values of the average (finding an object of average light is a bit of an art itself), the highlights, and the shadows to see how much latitude I have. I shoot Velvia reversal film, which has only five stops (or an ev range of 5), so I look primarily for which end of the brightness range I'll throw out: highlights or shadow. If I find the scene has acceptibly-low range, or if I can fix the scene's latitude with a gradient filter, I pick just one thing in the scene to meter. If there is grass in the scene (rarely) or light-colored leaves, I meter those and call it average. If there is brightly-lit sandstone (frequently, where I shoot), I meter that and call it one stop over middle gray, so I set my exposure one stop more than the meter indicates (the meter thought it was middle gray, I know it's one stop more than that, so I want to overexpose the meter reading by one stop). Very rarely will I find an object in the scene I think should be one stop less than middle gray. This method probably works okay down there, but since I shoot slides I prefer to work with the bright end of the luminosity range. Were I shooting negatives I'd work the low-end of the luminosity range.
I've tried incident metering a various landscapes in the past and it didn't work for me at all. I never bothered to figure out why. It works well with tungsten lamps, though.[/font]