The following  is an extract from an article in Indipepal. You can read the full version here.

Kenney Jacob and Brijesh Nair are both young techies with links to Thiruvananthapuram and who spearheaded the effort to get bloggers around the web to support the candidate of their choice, Shashi Tharoor. Jacob and Nair are first-time political campaigners, but have been blogging for a long time, and so focussed their effort for Tharoor on targetting the blogosphere. “Almost 10 per cent of Trivandrum’s population has access to the Internet,” says Jacob. “Most of these people are politically neutral and are willing to vote for a candidate with a difference. We just needed to reach them, that’s all.”

And reach them they did: teaming up to form “Bloggers for Shashi Tharoor,” the duo posted about Tharoor on their personal blogs, recruited 60 other bloggers to write about him, and began to aggregate content related to their candidate from around the web. Nair also used Twitter and social media to spread the word about Tharoor-he retweeted all the articles and blog posts about Tharoor that he could find and posted them on the India section of Reddit, a popular aggregation website as well.

Jacob leveraged his technical skills by creating “Vote for Shashi Tharoor” badges that bloggers could use to indicate their support and also sending out viral SMS’s and emails to reach those among the electorate that don’t read blogs or use social media.The two are confident that their online effort will help Tharoor emerge victorious and believe that “neutral voters of Trivandrum” have overwhelmingly voted for the candidate they have worked for so assiduously over the past few months.