Today on BBC News Online there is this interesting piece about the relationship between blogging and business. The essential thrust of the article is that if businesses do not listen to the swell of opinion written on blogs their business will suffer.

This inevitably leads me to wonder if and when this will happen to political blogs? Despite the honourable efforts of sites like Bloggers4Labour, the real impact of blogging on politics has not yet taken off – in the UK at least. The situation is somewhat different elsewhere – no Swedish politician dare not have a blog, with Margot Wallstöm (pictured) perhaps the best known political blogger in Europe. But would blogging have the power to change the course of elections in the same way as it caused a rethink of Dell’s approach to customer service?

Perhaps the signs are not good in the UK – politicos got a first taste of the danger of blogs when Jody Dunn, the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate in Hartlepool in September 2004, was ridiculed for writing about constituents in one street that they were either drunk, flanked by an angry dog or undressed. Unsurprisingly Labour had a field day – details here. Blair is always telling us that government needs to learn from the private sector, a claim that I am often suspicious of. Yet when it comes to the power of blogging, I think politics does have a long way to go…