Liveblogging The BOBs

This Thursday (27 Nov 2008) I’ll have the honor of liveblogging the award ceremony of The BOBs, the Best of the Blogs awards. (More about the BOBs in my first announcement or the official FAQ.)

Nutshell version (from the press release):

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.

The liveblog will go online around 8pm Berlin time (GMT +1) and there’s a number of ways to follow the event:

First, and of course best, is being there, live in the meatspace. If you’re in Berlin, don’t miss out, it should be great. The ceremony will take place in the Museum for Communication (Google Maps). It’s free and open, and after the ceremony you’ll have the chance to meet the jury.

Second, and hopefully not bad either, there’ll be live coverage: I’ll be liveblogging both here and on the BOBs website. (Full disclosure: This is a paid gig.) Personally, I’d recommend you watch it on the BOBs site, as there’ll also be a live video stream. You’ll get the videostream on your left and my liveblog on the right. Of course, you can also grab the embed code and spread the work (and thereby promote freedom of speech) on your own blog. Feel free to do so!

You can register here if you’d like to get an email reminder:

Update: Get the whole picture! I figured it might be even more interesting to follow both the liveblog and see what others are saying about the BOBs. So here’s what the folks on Twitter are saying:

The box above is done via Twemes.com, a pretty useful little service that aggregates in one place every tweet tagged with #thebobs. If you discuss the BOBs on Twitter, just include #thebobs in your post and it will show up here.

Update: Chinese jury member couldn’t leave China The Chinese blogger, citizen journalist and member of the jury Shuguang Zhou was restricted from leaving China. This sadly shows how important these awards are.