As the campaigns for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections heat up, several new websites are aiming to become the default source of news and analysis related the 2009 general elections.
These websites, however, are directly competing with election microsites from mainstream media — Hindustan Times/ Google, TOI, Mint, DNA, The Hindu, Yahoo!, MSN, Rediff, NDTV, IBN Live, India Today, The Week, Economic Times, India TV, Aaj Tak, Business Standard, BBC and Al Jazeera– and need to offer something different to be useful.
All the mainstream media election microsites have similar features: details about parties, constituencies, candidates and manifestos, statistics about previous elections, and an overload of news and opinion related to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. However, some microsites have unique features which stand out, so let me start by pointing to my favorite, often interactive, features on the mainstream media websites.
DNA, India Today, Business Standard and IBN Politics have user friendly pages for columns by some very well-known writers.
The Hindustan Times/ Google election microsite is based on Google gadgets which allows you to add individual features to your iGoogle page.
The Wordpress-based Hindu Election Blog allows you to subscribe to specific tags and categories.
MSN has a useful news aggregator which allows to you find news by candidate, party, or state.
The Outlook India Election Blog is doing a great curation role by linking to important stories from elsewhere.
Of the new players, IndiPepal is perhaps the most ambitious, with blogs from several well-known analysts.
India Voting and Engage Voter also have content rich websites with some interesting features.
BlogAdda has a very well designed social media aggregator for the elections, which collates photos, videos, and posts from election-focused blogs.
OneVote also has a well designed social media aggregator that collates photos, videos, tweets, blog posts and news reports related to the India elections.
As always, the Global Voices special coverage page for the 2009 Indian elections is quickly evolving into a useful resource to track the conversations in the Indian blogosphere related to the elections.
We are hoping that Vote Report India will become a useful part of this great eco-system of sources for news and analysis related the 2009 general elections.
Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections.
Basically, users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.
By aggregating both traditional and non-traditional sources of news on a clickable, searchable map, we are hoping that Vote Report India will not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.
We’ll also help you make sense of this rich information, by doing roundups for important issues on the Vote Report India blog.
The direct reporting functionality is already up and the ability to aggregate content from other sources will be up soon.
We would encourage you to spend some time at our website and project wiki to get a sense of what we are doing. If you like what we are doing, please join the Vote Report India community at Twitter (@votereportindia), Facebook, Orkut, SMSGupShup or Google Groups and subscribe to our blog. If you have a blog or a website, please consider writing about Vote Report India and displaying our banners (200X200 and 150X150). If possible, consider volunteering for one of our open work streams.
But, most importantly, do use and encourage others to use the Vote Report India platform, and help us make the election process more transparent.