It looks like we made the finals for the Jewish Blog Awards in all the categories for which we were nominated:

• Best Small Blog
• Best Anti-Establishment Blog
• Best Jewish Religious Post (for the Response to the Conservative Teshuva on Homosexuality post)
• Best Series (For the complete coverage of the Conservative Teshuva)

While it would be a nice ego boost to win in any category (i.e. go vote!), I realize that it’s a popularity contest and we’re up against stiff competition in all categories. When YUTOPIA started nearly four years ago there was no expectations of readership let alone awards – and the same goes for the individual posts. Personally I am proud of the posts on the Conservative Teshuvot as an honest Orthodox response to a watershed moment in American Judaism and regardless of the voting outcome the contents are still there people to find and read.
Thanks to everyone who voted in Round 1 and feel free to continue voting the the Finals (and pass it on). Either way we’ll keep blogging sporadically as you all expect.

I’ve also been informed that we’ve been nominated for “Best Small Blog.” You’d think I’d hear of these things in advance. Regardless, vote if you’d like while Round 1 is still going on.
I’m also mildly amused that someone thought to hack the system. Anyone remember when blogging was lishma?
*sigh*

In a move sure to placate literally tens of people, I have removed the TypeKey requirement for commenting on the blog. As an alternative, all you need to do is enter the name of this blog (case insensitive) in the supplied field and your comment will be posted automatically. Otherwise you will not see an error, but your comment will be labeled as “junk” and will likely been discarded with the blog-spam. If you were one of the few who registered, your TypeKey account will still work and will let you bypass the filter.
Hopefully people will find this mechanism to be less intrusive than having to register with TypeKey.
Thanks again go out to Shaya for the plugin installation.

Dear Loyal Readers,
I am very pleased to announce that we have just won our first J-Blog award! YUTOPIA is a Silver Winner in the “Best Jewish Culture Blog” category because apparently if there’s anything I know it’s Jewish culture.
In all honestly I have no idea how these things work especially since I’m not sure I’d put 2006 as one of my best blogging years (a 5 year retrospective will be forthcoming around May). In the meantime I must thank the newly redesigned Town Crier for the initial nomination and now I get to add this snappy little graphic to the sidebar:

Much to my dismay I recently discovered that this blog has been plagiarized. Specifically, my post The Mind Of A Matchmaker has been reproduced here1, links intact, indicating that the “Admin” actually copied and posted the HTML source code. That’s it.
No link back, no byline. Zip.

I feel like Metallica (and not in the good way).
Folks, this blog is published under a very reasonable license which really isn’t that difficult to follow. The basic gist is that anyone is free to reproduce this blog provided:

1. There is proper attribution
2. The reproduction is for a non-commercial purposes
3. You don’t make derivative works from it

I haven’t had a problem with this until now since whenever this blog has been used I’ve been quoted and people have asked permission (which I’ve granted every time I can remember). When I found the post in question I immediately e-mailed the following to the Admin.

Dear Admin,
My name is R. Josh Yuter and run the blog YUTOPIA. recently came across your post here:
http://bitachon.com/forums/jewish-dating/164-the-mind-of-matchmaker.html
Which was copied unattributed from one of my earlier blog posts here:
http://yutopia.yucs.org/archives/2004/07/the_mind_of_a_m.html
I publish my blog under creative commons license which allows for reproduction of content, provided attribution is given:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
That said I will not request removal of your post, but would ask for the proper attribution and link back to the original post.
Thanks and Shana Tova
Josh

Thus far, no reply.
I have a shiur I need to write up on copyright law in halakha, but regardless of any potential issurim it’s just so simple to comply with the license that violations are very frustrating.

1. I know by linking there I am directing traffic to them, but the example is well worth it.

I noticed recently that after the site update that one of the RSS feeds is no longer updated. If you’re into this sort of thing, please update your RSS bookmarks to either http://yutopia.yucs.org/index.xml or http://yutopia.yucs.org/atom.xml.

Dear Loyal Readers,
Sometime over the weekend, I’m going to be making some major updates to the back-end of the site. Although we moved to a newer version of MovableType some time ago I didn’t have the time to reset templates to take full advantage of all the features. Also, this will likely entail a change in the design, which in my opinion is long overdue. Hopefully I won’t mess things up too badly, but don’t be surprised if things appear a little messy at some point. Also I hope to get to writing some more including my thoughts on Edah’s demise and a few other things about which I have been thinking.