The Bobs Awards Are Back – Nominate Your Favourite Sites & Microbloggers today! · Global Voices
Georgia Popplewell

That blog or online activism site you visit each day without fail. That microblogger whose 140 characters sparkle with such wit and insight. Here's your chance to have those sites and users rewarded for their excellence by nominating them for the Bobs, Deutsche Welle's 9th annual international blog and social media awards.
Started in 2004, the Bobs—originally an acronym for “Best of Blogs”—were conceived by the German broadcaster as a means of demonstrating that blogging, then in its infancy, “was worthy of being taken seriously and to point to the excellent examples of work being done online to foster dialogue across language barriers.” In 2005, Global Voices was the winner in the Best Journalistic Blog category.
As the citizen media landscape has changed, the Bobs have adapted to suit. Today, Deutsche Welle describes the Bobs more broadly as honouring “websites in 14 languages that champion the open exchange of ideas and freedom of expression.”
Global Voices is a Bobs media partner once again this year, and three members of the Global Voices community will sit on the 15-person international jury—Global Voices en Français editor Claire Ulrich, Middle East and North Africa author Tarek Amr, and myself. The jury will meet for two days of deliberations in May to select winners in the six main categories. Winners in the other categories will be decided by the public through an online vote. In 2012, the Bobs received over 3,300 submissions, and over 66,800 online votes were cast.
Members of the public can submit nominations in 34 categories in any of the following languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Turkish or Ukrainian—the latter three are new additions to this year's language line-up. Also new this year is an award for microblogging, with nominations being sought for the best users of Twitter, Weibo and other platforms. Awards for Best Blog and Best Person to Follow will be awarded for each languages, with blogs in all 14 languages vying for the top prize in the other four categories.
Eligible web sites must be accessible to the public, with no password restrictions or registration requirements. Nominations for the Bobs are open until March 6.
Bobs web site in English: http://thebobs.com/english/