April 19th, 2009
Introducing IndiaTalks.org: What is India Talking About?
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A few months back, I had put up a test social voting site at IndiaTalks.org, using Drupal and Drigg. The idea was to use IndiaTalks.org to channelize the energy of India’s youth to find constructive solutions to India’s many problems. Users could vote or comment on ideas submitted by others or submit their own ideas. The most popular ideas were to be highlighted on the front page.
I still think that a social voting site for social change is a great idea, and someone should have a serious go at it. However, I had a dozen things in the air, as always, and I didn’t find anyone who would run with the idea, so the project never went beyond the test site stage.
Today, I spent a few hours in the afternoon hacking together an Indian Election Dashboard for Vote Report India, and decided that I had finally figured out what to do with IndiaTalks.org.
My hope is that IndiaTalks.org will become everyone’s default first stop to track news and opinion about important events happening in India.
The Indian Election Dashboard ties in nicely with the writing and advocacy (Vote Report India) work I’m doing for the Lok Sabha elections.
In the near future, you can expect more such dashboards for important events in India that need to be tracked compulsively (and, no, I don’t consider IPL an important event). The compulsive tracking will happen not only on the dashboard, but also on the many blogs I’m now writing at (see the sidebar for a selection).
IndiaTalks.org is inspired by Popurls and Alltop and built entirely on Wordpress using the wonderful OneNews theme.
BlogAdda, Dance With Shadows and OneVote.in also had the same (good) idea and beat me to the implementation, but I think there’s room for more than one such platform in India.
I was telling someone yesterday that one way to ensure that your predictions come true is to do yourself what you predicted others would do. I’m really happy that I have been able to play a small part in making my prediction about the 2009 elections being India’s first digital election come true.
