Deutsche Welle Fosters Bloggers Without Borders

For the fourth year in a row, Deutsche Welle will be presenting its Reporters Without Borders Award for blogging at the BOBs Awards on November 27. This award is the result of a cooperative project with Reporters Without Borders designed to recognize bloggers who use the platform to highlight, promote and further the advancement of the freedom of opinion throughout the world.

Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard was a member of the BOBs jury last year, and sees a real benefit to promoting freedom of opinion in the blogosphere.

“Reporters Without Borders is proud to promote online free speech,” Julliard said. “Blogs are often a means for people to express their views in countries where they generally cannot do this. The Internet is a revolution for voices that governments try to silence or harass. It was a great experience to be part of the jury as the BOBs are an excellent way of exploiting the Internet’s possibilities with regards to freedom of information.”

Among those nominated for this year’s Reporters Without Borders Award is the Cuban journalist Yoani Sanchez, who Time magazine voted one of the 100 most influential people of the year in 2008. Another nominee is Zeng Jinyan, the wife of the human-rights activist Hu Jia. She is currently under house arrest in China. The blog from the 4Equality project was also nominated. The project is aimed at collecting a million signatures in favor of more rights for women in Iran.

This year’s BOBs Awards will be announced at a ceremony on November 27 at the Communication Museum in Berlin. The BOBs is the world’s largest international blogging competition – drawing in more than 7,000 nominations per year. It was developed in 2004 and now has 16 categories, with winners being chosen by both an international jury of media experts and bloggers and through online voting. Judges look at blogs in 11 different languages – making the BOBs the world‘s only awards competition that offers a comprehensive overview of the global blogosphere.

For the first time ever, this year’s BOBs ceremony will also be broadcast via livestream and live blogging. The livestream is available through Sevenload and Peter Bihr will be creating and posting the live blog (http://www.thewavingcat.com/).