- Global Voices - https://globalvoices.org -

India Elections 2009: Tapping Into The Twitter

Categories: South Asia, India, Breaking News, Elections, Politics, Technology

This post is part of the Global Voices special coverage on the Indian Elections 2009 [1]

As the results of the Indian Parliamentary Elections 2009 came trickling in since today morning, Indians from all around the world were glued on to their TV or PC screens to see the updates. Besides the official site of the Election Commission of India [2] a number of citizen media initiatives have been taken to disseminate the results as they come in. Offstumped is live blogging [3] the election results and the comments reached 880 at the time of writing this report. Using Cover It Live [4] Offstumped has also a separate live analysis and debate page [5]. MSM like NDTV [6] is also using Cover It Live.

But the real buzz is happening in Twitter. The Economic Times reported [7]:

The excitement of the Indian elections has transferred online to one of its most popular social messaging sites – Twitter – where it emerged as the top topic posted Saturday.

The Twitter tag “#indiavotes09″ was the number one topic on the trends list of Twitter search, demonstrating once again the strength of Indians using these new technology tools.

Here we look at what people are saying in Twitter [8].

People are being updated with results as they comes in via various news sources:

ibnpolitics [9]

Naveenks is proud [10]:

naveenks [11]

Aerabati writes [12] that some Media sites were inaccessible due to high traffic:

aerabati [13]

Anita Lobo [14] says:
anita_lobo [15]

Calamur [16] informs:
calamur [17]

Jayapradeep requests [18] the CPM to concede defeat:
jayapradeep [19]

Vimoh [20] has this message for BJP:
vimoh [21]

Pradeep Mahaur lists in his blog ten reasons why BJP lost [22].

Testertested [23] is in celebration mood:

testertested [24]

The most encouraging of all are some Indian politicians using Twitter. The most popular among Twitterati Shashi Tharoor [25] informed [26] people of his status as he raced towards a massive victory in the election:
shashitharoor [27]

If more politicians could be so visible.

Follow the buzz on Indian elections 2009 via Twitter [28]:

twitter