Yahoo Unveils Its Elections Portal
Yahoo! India has come up with a portal to keep its users up to date with the on goings of the 2009 General Elections. The website can be viewed at elections.yahoo.in. The ultimate aim of the portal as they say is to create an involved and informed voter.
Updates on election schedules, expert analysis, online polls, discussion forums, opinions and photos would be some of the key features on the site. Users can also create their “own” manifestos by choosing which topic they would like to address. As the site evolves, Yahoo! India will also include interesting features like Manifesto Comparisons (a user can compare manifestos of various political parties) as well as comic strips on various news and updates during the tenure of the elections.
Apart from this the website aims to educate the youth on elections since many of them will be voting for the first time.
According to Pearl Uppal, Director – Sales, Yahoo! India, “Political parties and advertisers have come of age and are now actively looking at the digital medium to reach the youth audience, a key demographic for them. We have been approached by leading political parties and their agencies that have shown keen interest in advertising on Yahoo! to communicate with a highly engaged audience on the Yahoo! network. This is indeed an encouraging trend in the new age media”
It would be interesting to note whether political party’s ads would be showcased on the elections portal.
While the site is new and one should give it time to grow especially for the part where the content is user generated, one feels in general there isn’t much in depth coverage. Personally I prefer IBNPolitics.com in this regard which seems to have a much more comprehensive coverage of the whole event.
This past year has seen the emergence of many web portals to inform the voters of their rights as well as of the election scenario in India. The long list includes Jaagore, Lead India, Vote India amongst others.
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Its weird how Yahoo and google are coming up with products at the same time…. reminds me of the Cola War..
Yesterday I was watchin NDTV news net 2.0 yesterday and google had come over to the show.. to feature their polling website.. they had quite a deal there…. and I must say I was impressed… However Google said they would not be exposing all their findings etc before the elections… but they had a handful on the demo.. good stuff there..