The BOBs-2012: international blogging competition begins

The BOBs honor the best blogs with both Jury Awards and User Prizes. The blogs which enter the competition will be evaluated by the jury made up of media experts, activists and bloggers, and will be open for online vote starting April 2nd.  As for the criteria, the jury will look for the most creative and innovative, socially relevant, transparent and authentic blogs with original ideas and clever execution. And the users will simply vote for the ones they consider the best. The winners will be announced on May 2nd.

The BOBs accept blogs in 11 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, and Russian. The nominations are:

• Best Blog (overall and in each of the 11 languages)
• Best Use of Technology for Social Good
• Best Social Activism Campaign
• Reporters without Borders Award
• Best Video Channel
• This year’s Special Topic Award: Education and Culture

The BOBs competition takes place every year since 2004. Among last year’s winners were:

• A Tunisian Girl – blog of Lina Ben Mhenni who took great risks to write about repressions and censorship during the oppressive Ben Ali regime in Tunisia (Best Blog – jury winner)

• RosPil – open online community which strives to fight Russian corruption on a large scale by monitoring state purchases (Best Use of Technology for Social Good – jury and user winner)

• Novaya Gazeta’s blog – blog of the editorial team of Novaya Gazeta – ‘new paper’ in Russian (Reporters Without Borders Award – user winner)

SearchCowboys also joined the contest, so don’t forget to support us with your votes in April. So far, I’ll keep you posted on the topic. Who do you think is going to win this year?