For the first time in the three-year history of Deutsche Welle’s Best of the Blogs awards, an American blog, the Sunlight Foundation, received the competition’s Best Weblog honours. ‘The Sunlight Foundation blog is a group of people who are not only writing about transparency in American politics,’ said US jury member Mark Glaser. Recently the group’s ‘Is Congress a Family Business?’ project uncovered 19 members of the US Congress who paid their spouses a total of USD 636,000 (EUR 495,250) in 2006.
The Reporters Without Borders Award, which has become an integral part of the BOBS, was shared by two Persian-language bloggers. The first blog, ‘Kosoof,’ is a photoblog that proves that pictures sometimes do more for freedom of expression than words by publishing photos of Iranian dissidents with their families after release from prison. The second, ‘Tanine Sokut’ by Hamed Mottaghi, denounces human rights violations in Iran and reports on issues that aren’t covered by the national media.
The Jury Award for the best English-language Weblog in 2006 was given to paidContent.org. The jury said it respected the blog’s ability to move quickly in breaking news stories and commenting on developments in the digital media industry.