Eleven Web sites &£45;- in fields from the arts to commerce &£45;- garnered Global Information Infrastructure Awards on Monday. The sites were recognized as "champions of cyberspace" for "best practices and new models in the use of the Internet and network technologies." The names of the winners were announced at the third annual GII Awards Ceremony, hosted at Comdex by film critics Gene Siskel and

Roger Ebert.

Jim Hake, who founded GII in 1994, says that the awards are "not about what's cool. The focus is on businesses and organizations who are using the Net to achieve a real outcome." The winning sites offer "a glimpse of how the Internet will transform every sector of society," he says.

Winning sites were chosen from a field of 60 finalists by a panel of judges that included Net luminaries and industry leaders Esther Dyson, Don Tapscott, Patricia Seybold, Reed Hundt, and Vint Cerf. The winners were drawn from a wide spectrum of Net applications, from a site that offers community forums and health advice for those infected with HIV, to a project where high schoolers team up to build

educational Web pages, to Yahoo, which snagged this year's "netpreneur" award.

This year's winners were: the Dia Center for the Arts, Getting Real, Schwab, The Body, ThinkQuest, IndyGov, OncoLink, Yahoo, GUSTO, SERVEnet, and the Community Technology Centers' Network. http://www.gii.com/

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