That time of year has come around again. Starting on February 13, we'll be looking for your suggestions for the eighth annual Deutsche Welle International Blog Awards – better known as the BOBs.
Like last year, we're getting ready to accept your favorite sites in 11 languages. We understand: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesia, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
This year we're also happy to announce that the BOBs site is back at full strength and available in all 11 of the competition's languages -- in fact, we're putting the finishing touches on the site right now!
While there are some changes in store for 2012, including a couple of new faces on the jury panel (more about them soon), the BOBs will still feature a Jury Awards as well as User Prizes. The combination of online voting and jury-selected winners makes sure the BOBs continues to honor the best blogs, websites and campaigns on the Internet without turning into a popularity contest.
This year our jury of media experts, activists and bloggers will meet up in Berlin in May to debate and decide who takes home top honors in the BOBs. Patricia Cammarata, better known as das Nuf, joins the panel for German and Steve Vosloo comes on-board for the English-speaking world. We'll be giving you a more intimate introduction to Patricia and Steve, as well as the rest of the jury members, in just a few days time.
Highly cultured and well educated
For the most part, the 17 categories in the contest this time around are the same as they always have been. Six categories are multilingual and feature blogs from each of the contest's 11 languages mixing it up together for the right to call themselves a BOBs winner. Each of the remaining 11 categories is dedicated to a single language and a winner will be chosen among the finalists by online vote alone.
This year our "Special Topic Award" puts the spotlight on culture and education. This is also the focus of the 2012 Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn. While we will certainly continue to commend the bloggers taking a stand for freedom of expression, we'll also be playing special attention to projects and initiatives that look at the right to education and promote intercultural dialogue.
Get your suggestions in
We want to hear from you – but you'll have to get you message to us between February 13 and March 13. That's when the window is open for suggestions to the BOBs 2012.
You'll be able to suggest candidates in all 17 categories after registering using Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte or Sina Weibo or using your OpenID. We're hoping this helps open the BOBs up to countries where the usual social network suspects aren't necessarily the most popular services.
And just as a quick reminder: It doesn’t matter how many times a blog is suggested to the BOBs - once it’s in, it's in. Unlike other awards, the number of times a site is suggested does not play a role in whether it advances to the next round.
Timeline takeaways
February 13 to March 13: Suggest the blogs, websites and projects that impress you.
April 2 to May 2: Look over the nominees and in each category and vote for the ones you think represent the best of the best.
May 2: Sit back and find out who won as we announce the winners.
June 26: Come to Bonn, Germany, and meet the Jury Award winners at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum.
Yoani Sanchez, theBOBs winner in 2008 for her blog, has won BlogHer's International BlogHer Activist Award. Now there's a blogging campaign underway to convince Cuban authorities that Yoani should be allowed to leave the country to take part in the BlogHer conference next month in San Diego.
When Yoani won theBOBs three years ago, we also would have loved to have been able to host her. Instead we got this video message:
Yoani continues to be an inspiration to everyone at theBOB, so we hope you'll take part and - at the very least - let Yoani know you support her. We certainly think she should be able to travel to the conference - and anywhere else she wants to go, anytime she wants to go there.
Find out more and take part: Let's blog Yoani to BlogHer
Thanks to flippinyank for the CC photo!
Six winners of the 2011 come to Bonn, Germany, on Monday to accept their awards at a ceremony, which was part of the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum. Get a look at the Jury Award winners in the BOBs' six multilingual categories below.
What are the BOBs about?
Best Blog winner: A Tunisian Girl
Reporters Without Borders Award: Ciudad Juarez
Best Social Activism Campaign: We are all Khaled Said
Special Topic Award for Human Rights: Migrant Rights in the Middle East
Best Use of Technology for Social Good: Rospil
Best Video Channel: Stands with Fist
Stands with Fist also sent a message to the BOBs:
Congratulations and thanks go out to all of the winners and nominees in the 2011 Deutsche Welle Blog Awards. Keep up your excellent and inspiring work and see you in 2012.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
At least that's what they are according to Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But does it really apply to people all over the world.
Deutsche Welle examines the international status of human rights in an in-depth special looking at how people are treated - and mistreated around the world. A series of reports look at people's ability to eat, work and live with dignity in a globalized world. Additional commentary comes from Tunisia's Lina Ben Mhenni, this year's BOBs winner for Best Blog, as well as Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who won the Best Blog award in 2008.
The importance of social media when it comes to political activism was the topic of a public discussion at the Deutsche Welle on April 12. While the media have been filled with reports about how Facebook and Twitter influenced uprisings, we think it's worth the time to listen to what the people affected by the protests have to say.
Have a listen to these statements by BOBS jury members Amira Al Hussaini of Bahrain, Isaac Mao from China, and Erik Hersman of Kenya. The discussion was moderated by DW's Kristin Zeier.
It's been an exciting competition. Back in February we asked for your suggestions for the world's best blog, social media campaign and video channel - among others. And you came through with thousands of submissions.
Our jury narrowed the pack down to an impressive list of finalists in 17 categories and 11 languages.
Voting was opened to decide the winners of the User Prizes, and you were allowed to vote once a day. Jury members, on the other hand, had to sit at their computers and ponder which of each category's 11 finalists - all worthy of distinction - would get their vote for the BOBs highest honors: the Jury Award.
This year, after a passionate day of discussions, the jury bestowed the Best Blog award on A Tunisian Girl.
Writing bravely about repression and censorship in Tunisia long before the international media descended on the country during the tumultuous events of December 2010 and January 2011, Lina Ben Mhenni was praised by the jury for proving that a single moving voice can lead to major change. The certainty that she would also continue to track Tunisia's path - and stay true to her vision in the future - also left the jury members impressed.
Other Jury Award honors went to:
Best Use of Technology for Social Good: Rospil
Best Social Activism Campaign: We Are Khaled Said
Reporters Without Borders Award: Ciudad Juárez, en la sombra del narcotráfico
Special Topic Award for Human Rights: Migrant Rights in the Middle East
Best Video Channel: Stands With Fist
Our congratulations go out to all the Jury Award winners and the blogs and projects that claimed the User Prizes by receiving the most ballots in our online vote.
All of this year's Jury Award winners will be invited to accept their awards at a ceremony at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum on June 20.
Thank you for an interesting, exciting and successful competition.
Update: English press release
Thanks to Pete Prodoehl for the CC picture!
When we started the user voting for the BOBs back in 2004 all you needed to take part was an email address. It didn't even have to be a real one - just have a @ and a . and your vote was counted.
That didn't last long.
Next we had to start verifying addresses. What a pain: Vote (click), check email (click), follow link (click), vote in next category (click), check email (click), follow email (click). Etc. etc. for each category at a time when a lot of people weren't even using browsers with tabs. Talk about a time-consuming pain.
But that didn't last long either as people devised ways to try and game the system by generating new email addresses and automatically clicking links. Obviously, we always cleaned the final voting results, but it was a hell of a lot of work.
Then came the social network login. Facebook and Twitter to save the day.
But then voting started.
And again the ingenuity people employ to cheat their way to a prizeless, online award knows no lows.
We know that some Facebook and Twitter accounts containing only posts connected to the BOBs have been used to cast ballots in this year's competition. And we know some - not all - of those accounts were used to try an influence voting. But here comes the part that really upsets us: there's realistically nothing we can do about it.
Here’s why:
The BOBs are popular in some regions of the world where people use social networks other than Facebook and Twitter. There are also people who - for whatever reason - choose not to have a social network account but want to take part in the BOBs. These people needed to create an account to participate even though they had no interest in ever using the account again. There is no technical way to discern people who want to vote but don't normally use Twitter or Facebook from people creating new, real accounts to vote over and over.
To respect the privacy of the vast, vast majority of people who voted on this year's competition (and to be in line with German privacy laws), the BOBS voting logs are anonymized as they are created. We check that voters are logged in with a real Facebook or Twitter account and that each account only votes once per category per 24 hours. We can't - and don't want to - scan each and every users’ Walls, streams and posts in 11 languages to evaluate their online lives before letting them vote for a blog award - getting in your face like that just ain't our style.
Taking it from a purely technical point of view, the rules of participation that we set out have not been broken. We are certain no votes were cast without a valid login and that no login voted more than once per category per 24 hours. Those were the only rules we had because those are the only rules that can be technically verified.
We hope you will come back to this page tomorrow to read about this year's Jury Award winners. As always, the User Prizes and Jury Awards are completely independent of each other. What we can say with absolute certainty is that our jury members are not influenced by anything but their own well-founded views of what makes for great blogs, social media campaigns and other uses of technology.
We've been getting a few questions asking how voting work and about the BOBs' judging process.
It’s not meant to be a secret!
From how the suggested blogs come in to how the jury decides on the big winners, have a look through the Judging Procedure to see how everything works.
Since we started the BOBs back in 2004, the contest has always included two sets of honors: the User Prize and the Jury Award. This year is no different.
The Jury Award
We'd like to emphasize that the jury's decisions are the result of collective discussions. Individual jury members do not have the power to choose winners - or keep a project from winning. Every Jury Award winner needs to receive a majority of votes from the 12 jury members. The BOBs' jury members come from around the world, so the quality of Jury Award winners will have to impress an international panel of experts.
Keeping the User Prize honest
The User Prize, which is awarded in every category, is a little different than in years past but not all that different than other online awards. While you used to vote after providing a valid e-mail address and typing in text from a graphic, the number of attempts at manipulating the results led us to use other means of keeping the vote as fair as online voting can be. We now require you to sign in with a social network before voting. This is standard operating procedure all around the Internet as well as at other major online awards. SXSW's People's Choice Award, Mashable Open Web Awards, Philippine Web Awards and South African Blog Awards do it, too. Once you've registered, you can vote once per category per 24 hours.
As a major, international award, we decided consciously against limiting voting in the BOBs by IP address, which in our view would prevent far too many people using shared Internet connections in Web cafés, universities and businesses from taking part in the competition. We also realize that while Facebook and Twitter are internationally established online presences, they are not the be-all and end-all of the Internet around the globe. We plan to make logging in via other social networks available in future editions of the BOBs.
Voting still open
But next year hasn't come around yet, and there's still time to cast your ballot for the blogs, social media campaigns and projects you like. Even if they don't end up winning a User Prize, there's still a chance they could impress the jury enough for Jury Award honors.
Good luck to all the finalists.
Thanks to Theresa Thompson for the CC picture!
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