Clickz has an article called the end of product placement about structured blogging.

My mom blogs. She uses blogger and likes it because it is easy to use. There is only so much you can structure stuff before the added features make the publishing process less interesting or more confusing. My mom’s site is not going to end up on kritx.com because she does not care about hReview.

If you inherently trust the structure people offer then it fills with spam, and then you just end up with MORE product placement…see splogs for examples. 🙂

There is a lot of money in figuring out the structure of the web, but I think companies like Google and Yahoo! like the fact that there is a certain amount of noise and dishonest proposition created daily because it raises the barrier to competition. Directly or indirectly these large search companies will sponsor the noise necessary to block out competition.

I think advanced algorithms looking across the web graph will solve the problems with structure more than the content management systems will. The money is in aggregation and filtering, and it is doubtful that blogs as a whole will tap into any system that requires them to be a visual center to format the data. Even if data formats help some stuff it is still going to be the algorithms layered over the top that build the value that can be exploited for profit.