When legislation to create an online, searchable database of federal spending was stalled in the Senate last month, a small community of civic-minded bloggers who supported the bill did more than just comment on the delay: They launched a drive to find out who was holding up the measure and helped to expose the senators, freeing it up for final passage and President Bush’s signature.

In doing so, the bloggers showed that their personal Web journals can do more than just feed scandals, dethrone wayward lawmakers or bring mainstream journalists to heel. They also showed they have the power to move a piece of legislation — without spending cash, buttonholing lawmakers or hiring lobbyists.

Writing in his own online journal, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., praised the bloggers for their cooperation on the bill, saying they had created “a new model for participatory democracy in action.”

If that’s true, it’s unlikely that the model will be replicated very often. In this instance, the legislation itself — ordering a new federal spending database — united citizen watchdog bloggers of all political stripes toward a common goal. More typically, bloggers who get interested in legislation usually employ their medium to argue with other bloggers.

Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a group started in January to work for greater government transparency, applauded the bloggers’ victory on the bill. But he acknowledged it likely was an uncommon case. “When you have a wider partisan divide . . . I doubt that the blogosphere will have any more impact than any other group,” he said.

In the case of the database legislation, the wide support among conservative and liberal bloggers reflected the bipartisan support in Congress for the bill, which, significantly, was sponsored by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn and Illinois Democrat Barack Obama. Bloggers of all political persuasions liked the bill because it would open federal records to online inspection, and they would presumably be among the most active users of the service.

Some senators, however, were resistant to the idea of sunshine on their spending bills. Word spread online that at least one senator had placed an anonymous “hold” on the legislation just before it was to hit the Senate floor.

A cadre of public-interest activist bloggers kicked into action, urging readers to call every Senate office to smoke out the holdouts. “So who’s the culprit?” implored Paul Kiel in a posting on TPMmuckraker.com. “Since he/she is unlikely to fess up, bloggers from the left and right have united in the effort of eliminating suspects one by one. The only way to do this is to call your Senator’s offices up and get an answer.”

It wasn’t long before two veteran appropriators — Alaska Republican Ted Stevens and West Virginia Democrat Robert C. Byrd — acknowledged they had blocked the measure and would release their holds. The measure then easily passed.

“They have the ability to instantaneously communicate with, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of people,” said Stephen Smith, online communications coordinator for VOLPAC, Frist’s leadership political action committee. “That kind of flexibility and quickness of response hasn’t been matched.”

Millions of Web logs have been created by all types of people and organizations, and for all manner of subjects. Citizens, industries, interest groups, companies, unions and politicians themselves all maintain blogs — many whose only purpose is to advocate for issues and legislation.

But until now, the ability of the blogging medium to influence events largely has been limited to the political, media or public relations arenas, rather than policy. Bloggers in 2002, for example, played a role in forcing Mississippi Republican Trent Lott to step down as Senate majority leader because of comments he made that seemed to favor racial segregation. Last year, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather resigned from his post not long after bloggers questioned the authenticity of documents that Rather said detailed Bush’s service record in the National Guard.

The Coburn-Obama bill changed that.

“This is a victory for bloggers in a very different way. They didn’t take anyone down; they actually created a law,” said Tim Chapman, director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The question now is just what legislation bloggers may set as their next target.

Michael Cornfield, adjunct professor in political management at The George Washington University, says public interest bloggers will probably stick to issues that affect them. “Blogger influence on legislation seems to be at a maximum when the issue is one of government-corporate accountability, free speech or telecommunications policy — which is to say, when bloggers are behaving as an interest group,” he said.

Emboldened, the same group of bloggers who worked on the Coburn-Obama bill say it will press ahead on other proposals to increase awareness of how government operates.

Robert Cox, president and founder of the Media Bloggers Association, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to promote and protect grass-roots online media, would like to see some of the transparency in the federal budget process trickle down to state and local budgets, which he says receive even less scrutiny than at the federal level.

Chapman at the Heritage Foundation thinks it would be a good idea to require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Federal Election Commission. He also says bloggers may be able to push strong legislation to create a searchable database of earmarked federal spending, though he says the issue has been politicized.

John Hart, communications director for Coburn, said the senator would like to have bills available online and searchable for 72 hours before a scheduled vote. He added that Coburn welcomes hearing from bloggers on their ideas regarding a package of open government initiatives.

For most bloggers, the idea of getting directly involved in influencing legislation is not forbidding. Unlike journalists in traditional media, most bloggers are overtly partisan, and they tend to draw readers who share their beliefs. That means that even when liberal and conservative bloggers have the same goal, their motivations might differ considerably.

Bloggers’ influence rests on an irony, Cornfield said. “They are renowned for their partisanship and accused of worsening the polarization of American politics,” he observes. “Yet when it comes to their agenda, they eagerly cooperate across party lines.”

Hart says that the federal database idea was itself inherently nonpartisan — and that bloggers were merely reflecting the opinion of the majority of Americans that more information and transparency is a good thing.

But for some, the potential for political advantage was part of the motivation. Chapman noted that some conservatives viewed the database as a way to cut spending by identifying wasteful programs, while some liberals thought that it could be used to expose corruption or highlight programs that deserved more spending. “They may have had different reasons for wanting transparency, but in the end they wanted it,” he said.

Bloggers who participated in the Coburn-Obama effort used the technology and their readership in ways far removed from traditional media as well as other interest groups.

In making a game of figuring out who had placed the hold on the database bill the bloggers attracted their readers’ attention and spurred their participation. In that sense, bloggers differed from traditional media outlets in encouraging their readers to do some of the reporting.

As noted by conservative blogger N.Z. Bear, one of the founders of the Porkbusters Web site, bloggers were the conduits in the database bill effort; it was their readers who made the bulk of the calls. “[Y]ou have to distinguish between the blogs facilitating and the bloggers as some individual group of five or 10 people that made this all happen,” he said. “It’s a much, much larger group of people at large.”

Nevertheless, some conservative and nonpartisan bloggers were invited to the White House for the bill’s signing ceremony and to meet with Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management of the Office of Management and Budget, to discuss how to implement the database. OMB will design and manage the database.

Cox said the power of bloggers stems from their ability to bring attention to an issue. “Being the cynic that I am, I think legislators do things that people are yammering about,” he said. “If you can yammer really loud and long, they’ll pay attention.”

Yet broader legislative success for bloggers likely depends on methods other than ferreting out those who had placed a hold on a bill. “I think that’s a one-trick pony,” Bear said.

Mark Tapscott, a conservative blogger and editorial page editor at Washington Examiner, believes that bloggers have not tapped their full potential in exerting influence in Washington. “The key now is developing the kinds of processes, if you will, and procedures that will allow it to be focused on a broader range,” he said. “And that will happen. It just inevitably will happen.”

Because Coburn and Obama, senators with vastly different ideological bases, worked together on the database bill, some bloggers hope they will combine forces for similar legislation. They would like to see them form a type of Open Government Caucus that would provide inspiration all along the political spectrum. “I’d love to see it happen,” Chapman said. “Because I think they’d have a whole chorus of bloggers at their backs that would echo everything they’re trying to do.”