Interesting article from BBC on how blogs are being monitored by UK Businesses.

Take blogger-turned-consultant Hugh Macleod, who got involved in the medium when he set up the Gaping Void website in 2001 to showcase his work as a cartoonist.

"I was unemployed and I started exploring blogs - I was scraping a living as a freelance," he says.

With the internet, creating global micro-brands is cheaper and easier than ever before Hugh Macleod, Gaping Void blog

"One of my drinking buddies was a Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon, and I said to him, ‘You should start a blog.’ So we created English Cut, the first tailoring blog.

"To cut a long story short, if you search Google for ‘Savile Row’, we’re number one. His tailoring business thrived in a very short space of time."

Mr Macleod then moved on to work for a small South African wine company, Stormhoek, using his Gaping Void site as a vehicle for what he calls "wine blogging as marketing disruption".

In the first phase, he sent out free bottles of wine to about 100 bloggers in the UK, Irish Republic and France. Only those who had regularly kept up a blog for at least three months could apply, but the size of their readership didn’t matter - "just so long as they were genuine bloggers".

As a result, a lot of those bloggers ended up writing about Stormhoek wine. In the wake of his campaign, sales doubled, rising from 50,000 cases in 2004 to 100,000 last year.

That’s pretty impressive.

But Blogging takes hard work, as this writer knows full well:

Mr Macleod points out that blogging can be hard work: "The blogs don’t write themselves, and it takes a while for the voice to emerge - you have to hone it to where you want it to be.