I suppose it's inevitable - since blogs are the peferct form of SEO Optizied Web Pages, they tend to do rank better in Search Engines, are crawled more often (because they're updated more often) and tend to have a lot more links and interlinking.

But not that Blogs are doing so much better than you basic web page, and much better the Flash and other rich media pages, Search Engines started to identify pages ranking for highly in demand phases and segregate them so they either appear somewhere else on the Search Results page, or just in Google Blog Search and not in normal search.

And there's evidence here that Microsoft is going to do the same thing soon, as reveiled in Do Search Engines Hate Blogs? Microsoft Explores an Algorithm to Identify Blog Pages in Seo By the Sea - a blog item that was incidently shared by Robert Scoble in Google Reader.

From a blogger's point of view - isolating blogs from other web pages is bad news - as we benefit much more when our pages are treated as normal web pages.  When I've written an SEO optimized post, and from time to time I've done that, mostly on "hot" subjects featured on Google's Hot Trends - my posts always do much better when they show up as a normal web page.

Why?  A blog page, especially on a "hot" topic, is considered more "temporial" - as a result, Google was taking blog posts and, in selected cases, displaying them at the bottom of the first search results page for a query - and those links are updated by freshness - so after 24 hours, the link dissipears - gone, pretty much forever. 

But if you post is considered a normal web page - it's a different story - and your page will do, more often than not, much better in search. 

Here's how the Microsoft Patent will identify blogs - from normal web pages:

"…The patent filing is:

Identifying a web page as belonging to a blog
Inventors: Dennis Craig Fetterly and Steve Shaw-Tang Chien
United States Patent Application 20070294252
Published December 20, 2007
Filed: June 19, 2006

Abstract

A machine learning classifier is used to determine whether a web page belongs to a blog, based on a number of characteristics of web pages (e.g., presence of words such as “permalink”, or being hosted on a known blogging site). The classifier may be initially trained using human-judged examples. After classifying web pages as being blog pages, the blog pages may be further identified or categorized as top level blogs based on their URLs, for example.

In simplest terms, this patent application involves the use of a program that learns as it classifies pages either as a blog or a non-blog.

Some of the things that it might look at while doing that can include:

(1) Where the page is hosted, such as MSN Spaces, Blogspot, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal, Typepad, Xanga, MySpace, Multiply, or Wunderblogs or some other known blog hosting domain,

(2) Words and phrases from the page, such as “permalink”, or “blogroll”, or “powered by”, or “trackback”, “comment”, “comments”, “blogad”, and “posted at” or similar terms, including non-English ones, that are commonly found on the pages of blogs.

(3) The targets of outgoing links in the web page, such as links to Wordpress.org, or movabletype.com, or blogger.com;

(4) What shows up in the URL for the page that might indicate that it is a blog, such as “http://www.example.com/blog/”;

(5) if the web page contains an ATOM feed or an RSS feed.