Here is IBM description of sentiment analysis:
technique to detect favorable and unfavorable opinions toward specific subjects (such as organizations and their products) within large numbers of documents offers enormous opportunities for various applications. It would provide powerful functionality for competitive analysis, marketing analysis, and detection of unfavorable rumors for risk management.
Our sentiment analysis approach is to extract sentiments associated with polarities of positive or negative for specific subjects from a document, instead of classifying the whole document into positive or negative. The essential issues in sentiment analysis are to identify how sentiments are expressed in texts and whether the expressions indicate positive (favorable) or negative (unfavorable) opinions toward the subject. In order to improve the accuracy of the sentiment analysis, it is important to properly identify the semantic relationships between the sentiment expressions and the subject. By applying semantic analysis with a syntactic parser and sentiment lexicon, our prototype system achieved high precision (75-95%, depending on the data) in finding sentiments within Web pages and news articles.
http://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/textmining/takmi/sentiment_analysis_e.htm
Here is a tutorial on this subject:
http://www.alias-i.com/lingpipe/demos/tutorial/sentiment/read-me.html
about buzz monitoring:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/11/24/buzz-monitoring-observing-und-tracking/
