The SyFy Genre Awards, one of the Internet's first totally virtual, fan-voted entertainment awards, will see several changes in 2006, according to Michael Hinman, Airlock Alpha founder.

Now in its seventh year, the SyFy Genre awards have attracted hundreds of thousands of people to participate. They started in 1999, and has been conducted every year except 2002, which were cancelled following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The SyFy Genre Awards offer a ballot of five nominees in more than a dozen categories ranging from Best Actor/Television, to Best Special Guest Star, to Best Episode, which readers can vote once per day per e-mail address for 30 days.

"The Genre Awards has quickly become one of the elements that many people initially identify Airlock Alpha with," Hinman said. "Even from its humble beginnings with the original SyFy World in the early days of its existence, the Genre Awards has grown with the site, and with that growth comes some necessary changes."

Those changes will include:

* Voting for the awards will be moved from April 25 to May 25, as it has been in previous years, to June 25 through July 25 beginning in 2006.

* With the change in voting schedule, eligibility time periods will be moved from March 1 to Feb. 28 in previous years, to June 1 to May 31 beginning in 2007. Because Genre Awards officials don't want to leave any nominees behind, 2006 will actually have a one-time expansion of eligibility from March 1, 2005 to May 31, 2006, to accommodate the schedule change.

* The categories of Best Novel and Best Comic Book, which were introduced for the 2005 awards, have been discontinued.

* The category of Best Web Site will be added for 2006, which will be open to all science-fiction, comic book, horror and fantasy sites that currently operate on the Web. Airlock Alpha is NOT eligible for this distinction.

* The SyFy Genre Awards Nominating Committee, which in the past only included people who live in North America, will be expanded globally. The nominating committee will still remain capped at 25, however.

Hinman said these changes were needed. "The original dates of voting were meant to coincide with my birthday," said Hinman, who founded SyFy World -- the predecessor of Airlock Alpha, in 1998. "It was a nice way for me to remember when to do this each year when we were a lot smaller, but now that we've grown so much, it has become a little more cumbersome trying to interrupt seasons of shows to find out who is eligible and who isn't."

One of the complaints Airlock Alpha used to receive from both voters and nominating committee members alike is that it was difficult to determine what episodes of shows were eligible and what wasn't because the cutoff date of eligibility would fall right after February sweeps, but before season or series finales. It also created some strange issues of having shows that had been off television for more than a year to be eligible for Best Series nominations and such, simply because they had a few episodes of the final seasons air after the cutoff date. An example of that will come this year when "Star Trek: Enterprise" will still be eligible for major awards, even though it ended in 2005 simply because it had episodes that aired after February.

For Best Novel and Best Comic Book, Hinman said that those simply were removed because of lack of interest.

"It was something we thought we would try to do, to try and add a little bit of diversity to the awards instead of just concentrating on television and movies," he said. "But when we would get returns that showed 70 percent of people voting on the ballot skipping over those categories, we realized that it was simply something that didn't mesh well with what Airlock Alpha offered."

The new category, Best Web Site, was something that Hinman said he had struggled over including in past years.

"This really was something I was considering doing as far back as 2000," Hinman said. "The Genre Awards are not only a way for us to honor those we feel get left out by the Emmys each year, but also as a way to market Airlock Alpha, and introduce Airlock Alpha to new people. I was always conflicted about whether or not it would do us good to include sites that could be potential competitors to us. But in the end, I realized how many great sites are out there, and how they do deserve to get some recognition. Hugos did it for one year, but I would like to make it a permanent part of our awards."

Hinman said the SyFy Genre Awards Nominating Committee originally was limited to just people living in North America because airdates of programs were based on American runs.

"And while that did work out, one of the bad things that we kept seeing is that this essentially left out a lot of our international readers, who make up a very large percentage of our readership base," Hinman said. "Also, I noticed that a lot of our American nominating committee members would simply choose what they liked, and most of the time paid little attention to the suggestions we would get from our readers that we solicited. That would end up giving us nominees that no one cared about, and they would be blown out of the water. This way, I feel that the suggestions we get from our readers will be given more attention by our nominating committee, and increase their chance of being selected as one of the final nominees."

For the 2005 awards, "Stargate SG-1" was the big winner, taking Best Series/Television as well as Best Supporting Actor/Television for Michael Shanks, Best Special Guest/Television for Claudia Black, and Best Episode/Television for Black's episode, "Prometheus Unbound." Black also had won for Best Actress/Television for "Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars."

Other winners last year included Ben Browder ("Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars"), Amy Acker ("Angel"), Will Smith ("I, Robot"), Kate Winslet ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), Daniel Radcliffe ("Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"), "The Incredibles" for Best Movie and Steven Spielberg for the Gene Roddenberry Lifetime Achievement Award.