There's a parallel to the way newspapers and magazines are laid out. If you want to read the articles serially, you wind up flipping back and forth, and are exposed to the ads more frequently.

Magazines and newspapers have had a hard time moving into the web.

So what are the odds that you are seeing blogs being morphed into online forms of those layouts.

Or maybe its just the vendors of dead tree, page layout software, are moving on to new clients.