VA Mortgage Center.com and ‘You Served‘ are proud to publicly announce the winners of our Military Education Scholarship Program today. the 3 winners will each receive a $1,000 for educational purposes.

And the Winners are: (Drumroll please..)

Stacey Lang, Ann Marie Little, and John Parker (on behalf of his daughter Emily)

These very deserving winners were chosen from a pool of hundreds of applicants that sent in essays in response to our prompt “Why I Choose to Serve”. Each will be awarded a $1,000 scholarship from VA Mortgage Center.com through a fund that is 100% funded by the employees of the company.

We are proud to work with current and former members of the armed forces every day, and the scholarship program was established to say ‘thank you’ to all of you who have given so much for our country.

With the costs of higher education continuing to rise, we hope the Military Education Scholarship Program helps propel these students (and future winners) towards their academic goals.

You can read more about our winners and get a chance to read their essay submissions here on VAMC.

Thank you to all that participated and please check back with us in the fall for future installments of the program. To each winner, ‘You Served’ salutes you! ‘You Served’ would also like to thank the employees of the VA Mortgage Center.com.

The VA Mortgage Center.com is announcing its Military Education Scholarship program for this semester. Beginning today and running through May 1st, they are accepting submissions for our essay prompt “Why I Choose to Serve”. On May 10th, we will be awarding three $1,000 scholarships to the winning students to be used towards the ever-increasing costs of higher education.

As you can see from the program details listed here, this initiative is being fully funded by the employees of VA Mortgage Center.com (this is not a “You Served” program, though we will help facilitate it). It was their decision to sponsor a program that would help benefit the very people we happily work with every day - veterans and military servicemembers (and their families).

We encourage all eligible parties to apply for our Scholarship Program. If you know someone who is currently enrolled or looking to enroll in a higher education program and has military affiliation please pass this along.

As always, thanks to all of you who have served our country. We all owe you a collective debt of gratitude - so let us help you towards getting that college degree.

Who is Eligible?

All ROTC program students or active duty military looking to return to college are eligible for these scholarships.

Get more information or apply for the scholarship.

VA Joe is hosting a free NCAA contest that will give out $3,000 in prizes. To win, you must be members of the military or a veteran (family members can also play).

The contest is complete and the winners have been announced. But so far recognition was only given to the blogs that won the contest. It seems appropriate to include a larger list of the various blogs that performed well.

The list below is a more comprehensive list of the top performing blogs. Keep in mind, all of these blogs received at least 15 votes. Those are not just votes of support for the blog, each person only got one vote. So that means at least 15 people said each of these blogs was their absolute favorite MilBlog.

When you consider the competition and the number of amazing MilBlogs, that is quite a feat. Here is a list of the top MilBloggers according to votes from the contest (they are sorted alphabetically).

A Soldier’s Mind [blog.soldiersmind.com]
Acute Politics [acutepolitics.blogspot.com]
AfghanBlog [bouhammer.com]
Afghanistan Without a Clue [traversa.typepad.com]
American Citizen Soldier [americancitizensoldier.blogspot.com]
American Soldier [soldierlife.com]
Anger Management [airbyrne.blogspot.com]
Badgers Forward [badgersforward.blogspot.com]
Black Five [www.blackfive.net]
Blogs of War [blogsofwar.com]
Froggy Ruminations [froggyruminations.blogspot.com]
From My Position…On the Way [tcoverride.blogspot.com]
Iraq War Today [iraqwarnews.net]
Marine Corps Mom’s [marinecorpsmoms.com]
MichaelYon-Online [michaelyon-online.com]
Mudville Gazette [mudvillegazette.com]
Neptunus Lex [neptunuslex.com]
One Marine’s View [onemarinesview.com]
OPFOR [op-for.com]
Sgt Hook [sgthook.com]
Soldier’s Perspective [soldiersperspective.us]
Spouse Buzz [spousebuzz.com]
Standing By [blogs.tampabay.com/standingby]
Stryker Brigade News [strykernews.com]
T.F. Boggs [boredsoldier.blogspot.com]
The Captain’s Journal [captainsjournal.com]
The Fourth Rail [billroggio.com]

It is unlikely we will post more about this contest, we want to move on to our goal of providing valuable content to our visitors.

We are currently speaking with some of the winning bloggers about being a guest blogger in the future. And we are always interested to know what you, our reader, would like to see on the site. If you ever have an idea for a valuable, relevant post, let us know and we can possibly allow you to be a guest blogger.

The votes are in! I am happy to announce the winners of the Best Military Blog Contest sponsored by VA Mortgage Center.com (the list includes final vote count):

1) Soldier’s Perspective [soldiersperspective.us] 1103
2) Stryker Brigade News [strykernews.com] 995
3) Sgt Hook [sgthook.com] 846
4) Black Five [www.blackfive.net] 470
5) Afghanistan Without a Clue [traversa.typepad.com] 305
6) Marine Corps Mom’s [marinecorpsmoms.com] 157
7) Acute Politics [acutepolitics.blogspot.com] 136
8) Neptunus Lex [neptunuslex.com] 93
9) AfghanBlog [bouhammer.com] 86
10) Iraq War Today [iraqwarnews.net] 83
11) From My Position…On the Way [tcoverride.blogspot.com] 81

Congratulations, Soldier’s Perspective, you are the winner of the top prize of $3,000. It was a very close contest and even as of late last night, it was too close to even predict a winner. Since From My Position was so close to the Top 10, we thought we could add another $250 to the contest and award the top 11 bloggers with cash. This brings the award amount to a total of $5,500.

The number of votes that poured in is testament to the fantastic service each and every blogger provides, not only to the military community, but to a vast range of people.

Rosemary said, “If I could, I would vote for all of them.” That seems to sum up many people’s thoughts. Regardless of how often these bloggers post, how many readers they have, or the amount of time they are able to spend posting information, each one of them provides a truly valuable service.

Thank you once again for everyone that participated. If you are a fan of a certain blogger, make sure you let them know about it. Not on this site, contact them directly and express your appreciation and gratitude to them. None of these bloggers make a living blogging, they do it to keep you informed.

Hopefully some of you were able to discover new blogs which you have not read before. To help, I have compiled a few lists. I have a list of the top 10 Milbloggers (according to votes from the contest), a list of the top 25 and a list of all of the blogs that were submitted. Get the lists here. (Also, if you do not yet use an RSS reader, you should check out this information as well).

If you have not noticed, we have officially named our blog “You Served” as a tribute to all of those that have serve (and currently serve) our country. Hopefully we can provide you with enough great information in the future to earn a spot on your list of blogs that you read. We also plan on doing more contests and special events in the future, so stay tuned.

If you are a winning blogger, go here to find out what you need to do in order to receive your award money.

This competition is tough since there are so many amazing MilBloggers out there. It is evident by the huge response in votes the contest has received that these bloggers provide valuable and interesting posts for their users and you all deserve recognition for your efforts. We hope that people coming to this blog have been exposed to a few other great blogs in the process.

We are still accepting new blogs, so please submit them in the comments area of the main blog post if you would like to add any other Military Blog.

Here is the current list of top vote getters (with number of votes). Just because a blog is not in the top rankings, it doesn’t mean they are out of the contest yet. We still have 5 days for voting to occur (the contest ends at Noon Central Standard Time on Tuesday January 23).

Soldier’s Perspective 496
Sgt Hook 474
Stryker Brigade News 357
Black Five 320
Afghanistan Without a Clue 282
Marine Corps Mom’s 87
Neptunus Lex 85
Iraq War Today 73
One Marine’s View 61
From My Position…On the Way 59
AfghanBlog 54
OPFOR 49
Acute Politics 45
T.F. Boggs 44
Standing By 31
American Soldier 26
Blogs of War 22
Anger Management 21
Mudville Gazette 20
Badgers Forward 18
The Captain’s Journal 16

We would like to thank everyone for their participation up to this point and we would like to wish all of the bloggers good luck as we come down to the wire.

If you have not yet voted, you may still vote here.

Bloggers can win up to $2,500 in our
“Best Military Blog” Contest.

We are awarding prize money for the top 10 military blogs according to our visitors. Total prize money for the contest is over $5,000.

The Contest:

VA Mortgage Center.com is proud to announce our new blog. In our continued efforts of educating veterans and those currently on active duty, we have decided to keep our visitors better informed with updates to their benefits and changes in the industry via a blog. Our goal is to update you regarding changes in benefits including va loans, GI Bill, insurance, and other benefits.

Since the mortgage industry is only so exciting and changes in your benefits only happen periodically we would like to feature guest bloggers from some of the most popular military blogs on the internet. This will allow us to provide a variety of other interesting posts related veterans. In order to find out what type of content our users like and to find the best bloggers, we are running a contest to find the best military blogs online. As a bonus to the bloggers, we are offering prizes as well as the opportunity to be a guest blogger on our site.

The Prizes:

We are awarding $250 to the top 10 military related blogs, according to votes from our users. And the top military blog will receive a total of $3,000.

All of the top 10 bloggers will be given the option to be a guest blogger (but this will not be required). If you want to Nominate a Blogger, leave a comment with the URL of the blog or check out the nomination and blogger information page.

Void where prohibited.

Let the Voting Begin:

Place your vote according to what blog you think deserves the award for “Best Military Blog”:

If you have other blogs you think should be added to the list, please let us know in the comments area of this post.

UPDATE 1/23/07 Noon Central Standard Time

The Contest has ended. Results will be posted shortly.