Best of the Blogs Awards 2008: winners via live-stream video of Berlin ceremony

It's 21:00 in Berlin.

Deutsche Welle is holding this year's BOBs awards ceremony in Germany at present.

Waving Cat (Peter Bihr) who is live-blogging the awards, notes, "The jury member from China wasn't able to be here: Chinese authorities detained him and wouldn't let him come to Germany.
liu xiao?"

Here is a live-stream video of the awards.



Just announced, the Best Video Weblog: Voices of Africa

As I understand it, Voices of Africa hands out cameras to Africans and has them do reports about their lives.

Now it is being announced that the Reporters Without Borders Award for 2008 goes to two women, one Chinese, and a group of Iranian women. Clothilde Le Coz of RSF is announcing the winners.

Clothilde says: "Zeng Jinyan is blogging about her daily life. Her blog is accessible in China -- which is rare. She writes about her daughter. She's writing about great issues, for example, the Olympics. It's in Chinese. Congratulations!"

Zeng Jinyan is the wife of imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia (I blogged about Hu Jia here and about he, his wife, and baby here). The BOBs review writes of Zeng Jinyan: "Placed under house arrest, she uses her blog to provide a moving example of living life under the constant surveillance of the Chinese authorities."

Clothilde continues the award presentation: "Also we decided to award the Iranian women at 4 Equality who have worked to improve women's rights in Iran."

The BOBs description of the winning Iranian website reads:

This blog centers on fighting for women's rights and getting rid of discrimination in Iran by collection 1 million signatures on its petition by knocking on doors around the country. The movement, which has grown from the Weblog, has found a wide base of support in Iran, but the blog has been blocked 17 times by the authorities and 48 people associated with it have landed in prison.

Clothilde mentioned how difficult it was for the jury to choose a winner. All of the blogs nominated for the Reporters Without Borders award look interesting. They are listed here.

The awards ceremony continues. . . . Deutsche Well's BOBs is very international, handing out awards to blogs in over a dozen languages and special categories such as RSF award, best video blog, etc.

I will be interesting to read BOBs judge Mark Glaser's reflections on the jury deliberations for the RSF award again this year at the PBS website MediaShift.

Some more winners, via Waving Cat's live-blog:

Best political party blog: politicalpartytome.org
Best ???: http://FreelancerOnline.blogspot.com
Best Spanish blog 233grados.com
Best Dutch blog foodlog.nl
Best Russian blog Radiogrinch.ru:
Best Portuguese blog?: WWW.ELBOBERO.COM
Best funny (blogwurst) blog: maratochka.livejournal.com
Best weblog: from Cuba, Generación Y