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Background: I’m sure that many of you are familiar with Alltop. It creates destination pages for topics of interest by aggregating them on a dashboard that displays the five latest headlines from each feed. The items can be previewed by doing a rollover on the headlines and read by clicking on the headline. If you haven’t checked out Alltop yet, the Social Media, Social Entrepreneurship, Non-Profit, Good, and Human Rights pages might be a good place to start.

For some advocacy projects, it might be useful to build an Alltop-like dashboard that aggregates relevant content related to the cause on one page. So far, I had thought that it wasn’t really possible, without some serious coding.

Then, I built the Indian Election Dashboard for Vote Report India in two hours, and realized how simple it was.

Tool: The trick was to discover the wonderful OneNews theme for Wordpress, which is especially designed to build Alltop clones.

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.

Quick Summary: Gauravonomics Blog is featured on the Social Media dashboard at Guy Kawasaki’s “digital magazine rack” of the Internet Alltop.

Maverick investor Guy Kawasaki has been involved in several interesting startups of late (Truemors), but Alltop is the one I really like.

Basically, Alltop has a number of sub-sites, or dashboards, focused on a narrow vertical. Each dashboard features the headlines of five most recent stories from 30-50 top blogs and websites for that topic. When you place the cursor over a headline, it displays part of the story so that you can decide if you’d like to read it.

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. (link)