I first read about and subsequently looked into Structured Blogging and Microformats a while back but a recent podcast on IT Conversations by Marc Senasac reminded me of them. Marc is CEO of PeopleAggregator, a company that is trying to successfully bring together and market more buzz-words under a single umbrella than most people care to know about.
Structured Blogging
Structured Blogging is an initiative intended to bring some structure to the world of blogging. It seems like when-ever people start doing unstructured and completely random things there is always another group who wish to impose some form of framework to which they do it. Structured Blogging is attempting to infuse a little more intelligence into your average blog, mainly by first asking the blog author to give their blog post a little description (is it ramblings, a review or a podcast?). This description is recorded as a Microformat so that search engines and other such tools can do more intelligent things with blog entries than simply read them.