Category: Site Announcements

I spent the past a week setting up a new dual-core server for the Atlasphere, moving our site onto it, and ironing out the seemingly-endless bugs that come along with making a giant OS upgrade.
On the upside, the new site seems screamin’ fast from where we stand. Hopefully you’ll find the same!
If you run into any remaining bugs, please let us know. Yesterday was a particularly buggy day (login problems, etc.) and I apologize to those of you who were temporarily inconvenienced.
We’re still hoping to launch a complete overhaul of the site, perhaps later this year, using the Ruby on Rails platform. In the meantime, this current upgrade was strictly for performance and reliability purposes.

We’ve had more than 100 140 new members join in the last 24 hours, on the strength of this mention in the NY Times Book Review.
One of our new subscribers just sent us the following feedback, which highlights a key aspect of the Atlasphere’s business model that most members probably aren’t aware of:

…Speaking of credit, I’d like to “credit” the Atlasphere for not requiring that both boy and girl be subscribed in order to communicate through the dating site. As you know, Match.com and others require both parties to subscribe before communcation can occur, and so a large percentage of the “available” women (and men, I’ll guess) on these sites are not truly available because they haven’t subscribed. This is borderline fraud in my opinion, and I’m glad to see that at least one site has the integrity to be fair to its customers…but I shouldn’t be surprised, because this is exactly what one would expect from an Objectivist-affiliated business. 🙂 Keep up the good work!

Couldn’t have said it better myself. When the person you’re writing to must have a paid subscription to respond, and less than 1% of the members have subscriptions (which is quite common on mega-sites like Match.com), that means you’re 100 times less likely to be able to strike up a conversation — and your subscription has 1/100th the value you thought it would.
The Atlasphere’s policy, here, is beneficial not only for subscribers, but for free members as well — because even if you don’t have a subscription yourself, you can still meet people on the Atlasphere by simply replying (for free) whenever a subscriber contacts you.
And neither of you must figure out stealthy ways conceal your e-mail address in your message.

Q: What do the web sites for (a) The Atlasphere, (b) Ayn Rand protégé and novelist Erika Holzer, (c) the American adaptation of the Italian We the Living movie, (d) Ayn Rand biographer Barbara Branden, and (e) Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks’s Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship all have in common?
A: They were created by Zoom Strategies.
I’m one of the founders of Zoom. We just launched a sleek new web site with our updated portfolio and testimonials from many of our happy clients:

If you know someone who may be in the market for a top-notch web site, please spread the word.

The Atlasphere recently published its 500th column — which happened to be Jacob Sullum’s “Sizing up Fred Thompson’s Federalism.”
Coincidentally, we’ve also begun collecting reader feedback on all of our columns. This form for submitting your feedback appears at the bottom of each column, and is open to all Atlasphere members, paid or unpaid.
Your feedback will be e-mailed to the author — assuming he or she has an Atlasphere profile, as the vast majority of our authors do — as well as to me and Atlasphere Editor Phil Coates. We’ll use your ratings and comments not only to help guide future publishing decisions, but also to provide periodic lists of our “top rated columns.”
In addition, we’ll be culling our very best reader feedback for a “letters to the editor” feature for each column we’ve published. Expect this feature to show up within a few weeks, and it will apply retroactively — i.e., once we launch it, we’ll be publishing some of the feedback you submit between now and then.
We quietly launched our feedback feature a couple weeks ago, and many of you have already availed yourself of it. In fact, as of this moment we’ve collected 353 ratings from 150 members on 96 different articles.
We look forward to hearing from the rest of you, as well. You can begin by perusing former Rand attorney Henry Mark Holzer’s “The Iranian Time Bomb,” independent journalist Michael J. Totten’s interview “Al Qaeda Lost,” or 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel’s “Our Crazy Health-Insurance System.”
Currently, our two top-rated columns are Jessica Bennett’s “Which One Are You?” (from the Atlasphere archives, originally published in 2004) and Paul Hsieh’s new ARI-distributed Op-Ed “‘Single Payer’ Health Care Is Hardly Free.”
If you would like notification each time we publish a new column, you can turn that on by updating your notification preferences or by entering your e-mail address in the “Get Notified” box at the bottom of any column.
As always, please contact us if you have questions or suggestions for further improving the Atlasphere.

A few of you have written in recent months asking that we improve the way search results are shown at the Atlasphere.
In particular, you mentioned it would be more helpful if the results were divided into a set number of results per page, rather than dumping out all 500+ results on one page if you search for something popular like “chess” or “psychology.”
I finished making this upgrade last night. Now, when you conduct a search, the results are shown 50 per page, and you have a menu for navigating through the results.
Next up: We’ll make it so you can confine your search results to your geographical area — another popular request.
Meantime, take the new functionality for a test drive, if you like, and let us know if you have any additional requests!
UPDATE: Today we also made it so that it’s impossible to view directory profiles that have been suppressed by the user. (Previously, they were simply withheld from being listed in the directory; now they are actually impossible to view, even if you know the correct URL.) The option to suppress one’s directory profile is available only to members with active dating profiles.

As you no doubt noticed if you tried accessing the Atlasphere this evening [it’s 12:27 a.m.], we’ve been making a lot of upgrades to the site.
Our first step was implementing the new design you see before you. We actually had to close the site for about five hours this evening while we made the transition. (We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. This should be the only time we have to actually take the site offline.)
Next, we’ll be ironing out any bugs associated with this new design, and making some small improvements in how errors are handled, etc. Finally, we’ll be adding some cool new features over the coming weeks!
There are likely to be plenty of small bugs during the next couple days. If you encounter any big problems, however, or are just feeling particularly helpful, send us a note and we’ll try to fix it ASAP!

Questions about why we published this-or-that column come up not infrequently at the Atlasphere. Below is a letter I wrote to a new Atlasphere member who had questions about how we decide what to publish, in general, and about Jessica Bennett’s most recent column, “Rationally Green,” in particular. Perhaps others will be interested to hear this information.

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In general, we strive to publish lively, stimulating content of likely interest to fans of Ayn Rand’s novels (who may or may not consider themselves Objectivists). Feel free to peruse our writers guidelines, if you’re curious.

Occasionally one of our authors skirts the lines of what we find philosophically acceptable and we definitely try to keep things relatively Objectivist-ish, in that regard. At the same time, we don’t devote a lot of time to enforcing intellectual “purity.” We trust and encourage our readers to think for themselves, and we’re more interested in providing stimulating material than in providing philosophically exact content.
To provide an analogy, within the Rand-admiring community, we strive to be more of an Atlantic Monthly than, obviously, an academic journal. If you’re looking for scholarly or philosophically scrubbed material, there are others that do this much better than us. If, on the other hand, you are interested in casual worldly discussions of this-and-that, we seem to be a good place to go.
At least, that’s the conclusion I reach from the number of people who’ve signed up for our columns announcements. We’ve had well over 4,000 members sign up to receive an e-mail notification each time we publish a new column, and every day more people ask to be added.
Fewer than 5% of those who request the announcements have ever turned them off — meaning they happily keep receiving three new column announcements from us every week — which never ceases to amaze me, personally. I truly never thought our columns would be quite so popular, but they seem to be meeting some kind of need, out there.
Regarding Jessica’s most recent column in particular, I think Jessica is advocating more of the “conservationist” position, which was the old name for environmentalism, before it became a political cause and a religion for some people. Conservationists were people who loved nature and wanted to help protect it. You can kind of sense that Jessica’s groping toward a free market solution to the problem of how to protect nature. I don’t think this is hard to see.
I actually didn’t see this particular column before it was published. Our editor, Carol Brass, handles all that, for which I am eternally grateful. She and I both have full schedules, and the Atlasphere actually doesn’t get paid for the time she and I invest in these columns. On the contrary, I pay our editor and writers a small amount of money to create this content, and I receive no direct compensation in return.
So if, in the rush of day-to-day life, something slips by that one of us regrets for some reason — I don’t see it as a big deal, usually. If it is a big deal, I’ll edit or pull the column post-publication, and send the writer an explanation. But I’m disinclined to do that for this particular column, because I think it’s just a matter of whether readers are willing to entertain a position that’s fairly understandable, all things considered.
You probably wouldn’t know this, but Jessica is actually one of our more popular columnists; she has her own following at the Atlasphere. Usually she doesn’t write about topics with a strong political charge. Something about her thoughtful (“poetic” as you called it) style of writing resonates with many readers — including me, I should say.
She’s stylistically different than our other writers, and she’s got a gift. She really does make you want to think things over, which I think is great. You might be interested to browse the archives (on the search page you can enter an author’s name to view all their columns) and read some of her earlier columns, if her style appeals to you.
You asked how you could submit a reply to her column. If you’re a paid Atlasphere subscriber and you’d like to reply to her personally, you can send her an e-mail via her Atlasphere profile (linked from the bottom of any of her articles). Or, if you’re interested in publishing a column on the subject, we do welcome submissions that present alternate perspectives on a subject as long as they don’t read like a response to an earlier column. Any column you submit should stand well enough on its own, without needing to quote-and-reply to earlier content.
I should also mention that we have published other columns, like this one by Walter Williams, taking a firm stance against environmentalism. So I don’t think there’s any reasonable way to infer that the Atlasphere is endorsing environmentalism per se by publishing what Jessica wrote. Ultimately, I think, Jessica is expressing an understandable tension between her own natural pro-nature sentiments and the wacky global-warming environmentalist Kool Aid that so many people seem to be selling these days.
I hope that answers your questions. I welcome your thoughts.
UPDATE (Mar 23): As it would happen, Thomas Sowell just penned a new column called “Global Warming Swindle” (his review of the excellent British documentary with a similar title) which we are happy to be able to publish. We look forward to covering the topics of environmentalism and global warming further, as the public debate over global warming continues to heat up and more excellent material is written.