Curious about what’s been going on at The Bobs since the awards were handed out last year? Well, in addition to the colorful new site, we’ve made some changes to the contest before it starts its ninth edition.

We’re adding three more languages to the award – Hindi, Turkish and Ukrainian – opening the contest’s categories to a total of 14 languages. What exactly does that mean? Read through the site in your choice of Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, or Ukrainian.

This year we also want to know about what microblogs keep you most informed and entertained. That’s why we’ve decided to add a category for Best Person to Follow in each of The Bobs’ languages. Including the new microblog categories, there are not 34 categories for international excellence to be recognized.

The 2013 Jury

The jury speaks here at The Bobs. It’s up to jury members to choose the nominees and all 14 jury panel members (one per language) meet in Berlin to discuss, debate and decide on The Bobs Jury Award winners in the six big, multilingual categories.

This year’s three new languages, of course, will have jury members as well. Dr. Özgür Uçkan teaches communications at Bilgi University in Istanbul. He is a well-known blogger in Turkey and has written several book on net-related topics. Mustafa Nayyem will keep his eye on the Ukranian internet scene for The Bobs. Born in Afghanistan, the  journalist, blogger and TV moderator has become one of the most important political voices in the Ukrainian internet. We’re also happy to welcome popular blogger and moderator Ravish Kumar as The Bobs’ Hindi jury member.

Starting February 6, you can read about all The Bobs 2013 jury members.

Save the date: February 6

In addition to finding about the jury members, February 6 (at high noon, German time) is also the day when the window on suggestions to the 2013 The Bobs will open. We’re all looking forward to seeing your suggestions.

The winners of this year’s Jury Awards met at a prize ceremony in Bonn, Germany, on Tuesday. The event was part of the Deutsche Welle Global Media forum.

We’re not going to rehash the entire ceremony here – you can read about winners here and here.  But we would like to take the opportunity to thank the winners for their inspiring and moving words. Your creative work continues to influence people around the world.

Here’s a review of the winners:

Best Blog: Window of Anguish (Arash Sigarchi, @sigarchi)

Best Social Activism Campaign: Free Razan (Sherry Al-Hayek, @sherriecoals)

Best Use Of Technology For Social Good: Harassmap (Rebecca Chiao, @Ribeska)

Special Topic Award Education and Culture: Fasokan (Boukary Konaté, @fasokan)

Best Video Channel: Kuang Kuang Kuang (Wang Bo)

Reporters Without Borders Awards: Abu Sufian’s Blog (Abu Sufian)

Photos of the Award Ceremony and the Jury Winners

English Press Release

Our 12 jury members decided on the winners of the 2012 BOBs! After sifting through 3,200 you had a chance to choose the winners the BOBs’ User Prizes in 17 categories and 11 languages. And after an exciting month of voting, the winners have been decided, so go check them out!

In addition to the User Prizes, the jury of bloggers, media experts and activists also got shut into a conference room for a day to cure the best blogs, and campaigns and media project in the main six multilingual categories.

Blogger and journalist Arash Sigarchi was this year’s big winner, taking the Jury Award for Best Blog with “Window of Anguish,” where he writes about human rights, social and political topics about his homeland. Window of Anguish is widely read inside and outside of Iran for its objective view of current events. Currently in Washington, Sigarchi maintains close connections to many sources in Iran.

This year’s other Jury Awards went to:

Best Social Activism Campaign
Free Syrian Blogger& Activist Razan Ghazzawi

Special Topic Award Education and Culture
Fasokan

Best Use of Technology for Social Good
Harassmap

Best Video Channel
Kuang Kuang Kuang

Reporters Without Borders Award
Abu Sufian’s Blog

Our thanks and congratulations go out to all the Jury Award winners for their amazing and inspiring work. We’re looking forwarding to meeting you at next month’s Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany.

UPDATE: We can’t count on computers

Long into the night there was pointing and there was clicking (and cursing at our computers), but the best result we can establish is that both Jou3an and Window of Anguish earned the same percentage of votes cast in the Best Blog category.

That’s why we are declaring both Jou3an and Window of Anguish User Prize winners in the Best Blog category. Our congratulations go to both of them!

So what was the problem with the website? Here’s what happened: when we threw the switch from the “voting phase” to the “winner phase” our servers published the results before counting the votes cast during the last seconds. After counting those last under-the-gun votes, the result changed. Remember when we said it was a “neck-and-neck” race, we weren’t kidding – we’re talking about 13 votes for Window of Anguish.

But because it was our mistake, we find the fairest solution is to award the User Prizes to both of these truly exceptional bloggers.

Since our website wasn’t setup to handle this kind of eventuality, it’s going to take some time to get the page up-to-date.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the confusion.

Voting begins today in the Deutsche Welle International Blog Awards – the BOBs. Our international jury of bloggers and media experts waded through the more than 3,200 submissions you made and whittled the list down to just 187 candidates in 17 categories and 11 languages.

Now it’s up to Internet users like you to pore over the candidates and vote for the ones you find best. Your votes will decide the winner of the User Prize in all 17 categories. All the details on how to take part In the poll in our Rules.

We’d like to thank our jury for putting together such an impressive list of candidates and creating a snapshot of the international blogosphere.

In all 11 languages, there are some really great blogs, video channels and inspiring social activism campaigns and educational projects that run the gamut of online political and social responsibility and are certainly worth reading about.

On May 1, jury members will get locked into a conference room in Berlin to decide on the winners of this year’s Jury Awards in the BOBs’ six multilingual categories. Whether it’s the best blog, video channel, social activism campaign, use of technology, educational project or stand for freedom of expression, the sites in six top categories are language-independent, so candidates from all 11 languages vie for a single prize.

Curious about the candidates yet! Go to the Voting page and get the lowdown on all of them and find out what some of the bravest, most creative and inventive bloggers are up to – whether you speak their language or not.

All the winners of the 2012 BOBs will be announced right here at thebobs.com on May 2. Jury winners will also be invited to an award ceremony to pick up their BOB in Bonn, Germany, on June 26 as part of the annual Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum.

Thanks to JosephGilbert.org for the CC photo.