The most obvious is structuring content for search and business intelligence. For instance, technorati has raised its own search visibility with the reltag microformat. By helping determine the relevance of given content, reltag also enhances technorati's ability to sell its index data for market intelligence.

A less obvious business proposition for microformats is structuring content for collaboration. Over the past month, I've been having conversations with Mike Migurski of reblog fame and various others including Mark Rickerby and Lucas Gonze. In these conversations, we have focused on microformats as easily identified packets of information inside of web pages.

With the right infrastructure, people could pass these packets around and share them. Mike Migurski and his team are already doing this with full blog posts using reblog. In the course of our conversations, Mike has decided to extend reblog to allow people to redirect microformatted content and html form data to it. In turn, reblog will output microformatted content. On the output end, all sorts of converters can be built to take the microformatted content and allow it to be input into other programs (address books, spreadsheets, etc.) for further processing.

How do you monetize this? I see two possibilities. Installing and adapting reblog to different organizations is a design business, playing into Mike's current business model at Stamen Design. The second is to develop a subscription service for small groups that want to share particular types of data. The trick is to come up with right combination of services similarly to what BasecampHQ has done with project-based collaboration.