Covering Elections Through Blogs- BBC Election Train-2009!
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Covering Elections through Blogs- BBC Election Train-2009!

Founder of Telecomblogs India

This is something fresh. Mr. Soutik Biswas, online editor of BBC news is busy these days. Reason, he is sleeping, eating and writing on a cross country train to give us updates on Indian General Elections-09. The train itself is a seven coaches long, air conditioned, fully painted in red & white, with big stamp of BBC everywhere on it. The team BBC is off to 8000km journey across eight cities for eighteen days, only to cover 2009 Indian General Elections.

BBC Election Train

The reason Mr. Biswas is busy these is that, he is keeping readers updated about election stories from cities he visits through blogs, he posts at the end of the day. Some of the blogs posted by Mr. Biswas are good one. The one recently posted from Ahmedabad "It's raining shoes here" describes the drama of throwing shoes at PM first & then at shadow PM Mr. Advani. Nothing much actually except the new term coined, ‘Shoe-Nami’ in Ahmedabad! All other details could be easily read out elsewhere also!

There are some other blogs posted by Mr. Biswas like, 'We’re off!', 'Long hot campaign', 'Big day at last' & 'Into the heart of India' etc. Some of them are quite interesting to read, but others are pretty much drab to read out. Mr. Biswas needs to really work hard on his narration style to make it more readable & interesting. The train is off to Mumbai to cover next lot of elections. To catch the updates about train, check out link at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/indiaelection09/ .

You can also catch the glimpse of journey photographs at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbcworldservice/, provided by BBCworldServices. Some of the photographs taken were really good, on and average they just don't speak for the matter. Along with that, you can also subscribe to RSS feed for getting updated blogs. Also, you can check the BBC India Election Train Map, where you could see the itinerary of train across subcontinent.

More or less, it's good attempt by BBC News to take note of Indian Elections by undertaking a journey on train. But the blog updates & subject matter provided aren't good enough to read through. More or less, after visiting the blog link, what you could recall is, few photographs of train & not worthy matter to read. But still it's a good attempt by BBC to take note of it!

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