Judging for the 6th annual Sun Microsystems IT Journalism Awards is well underway, with a good number of judges having already submitted their scores.

We've had a couple of people ask when we're announcing finalists so I though I'd take this opportunity to remind entrants that there are no finalists this year as we have put in place a new judging process this year.

In the past, we've used a preliminary judging panel of four people to narrow down the list of entrants to a set of finalists. A primary objective of the preliminary judging panel was to ensure that anyone who was a candidate for winning the award got through to the final judging phase. As the awards have grown and we've added more categories and covered a broader gamut of the tech media community, it's been impossible to really put together a panel with enough expertise in all the various niches of technology journalism to ensure we got it right with the finalists.

This year, every entry has gone straight through to the final judging panels, which are made up of people with significant experience in each category type. We feel far more comfortable now that every entrant is given a fair chance of winning the Lizzie.

It also means we can put much greater emphasis on our Commended and Highly Commended awards, to recognise those journalists who have done great work but didn't quite score enough points to win the Lizzie.

Good luck to each of the entrants, all of which will be getting their ticket to the awards in the next couple of days.