A group of about 30 web startups have put together an initiative called the Structured Blogging Initiative, in an attempt to bring some order and standardization to the blog-o-sphere. What is their meaning of structure? According to the site:

Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that's more usable. You can enter information in this form and it'll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.

Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data - events, reviews, classified ads - can be represented in your blog.

Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.

This opens up a whole new world of collaborative sharing of information, beyond the boundaries of what is possible and available right now. Imagine blogging about the sale of your 1949 Ford Mustang and having that information automagically posted up on multiple forums and picked up by specialized search engines (like technorati) that search blog sites, but being able to filter your search by model, year, price, etc. Another quote from the site explains it:

Using Structured Blogging, job listings can be created, posted, searched, and found by any service; buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services.

Visit the Structured Blogging site to read more