The Hill examines how blogs and other online activity can generate buzz for a lobbying effort or grassroots campaign.

[Michael] Cornfield’s firm, 720 Strategies, is part of a growing subset of the lobbying business that tries to measure the political impact of buzz. Using complex algorithms that sift through the mass of data passing over the Internet to pick out a few relevant blogs and reader comments, Cornfield and 720 produced an EKG-like chart that showed the times the piece was mentioned spiked when The New Yorker first put the article online, when it came out in the print magazine, and then when President Obama made note of it in a major healthcare reform address.