Atlantic Exchange

Here's a neat opportunity -- the magazine is looking to recruit members of a panel ("Atlantic Exchange") of readers of the magazine and website who'd be surveyed no more than twice a month to gauge your thoughts about what we're doing so that we can better shape the various aspect of our editorial product to deliver stuff people want to read. Click here to learn more.

Comments

Survey this:

Fire. Ambinder. Now.

Posted by Eric Blair | June 28, 2008 2:25 PM

Ooh, customer feedback.

My question: does this make the Atlantic more or less Web 2.0?

Posted by Freddie | June 28, 2008 2:38 PM

Matt, your blog has been attacked by spammers. Not the comments section- the actual blog posts.

Posted by Brent | June 28, 2008 2:51 PM

Bring back Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. The editors don't appreciate how I (and surely some other reader) would carry around the Atlantic Magazine for weeks while I pecked at their puzzles. I was a walking advertisement (though by the end of the month the scribblings on the puzzle would look like the Unibomber Manifesto...)

Posted by Preston | June 28, 2008 3:07 PM

Agreed. Ambinder. Sucks.

Posted by Joe Strummer | June 28, 2008 3:08 PM

Ambinder & Douthat must go!! Sullivan's beagles could probably write better then those two.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | June 28, 2008 3:32 PM

Do you need a panel to say 'fix the damn server timeouts on comments'? Really?

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 28, 2008 3:43 PM

Also fixing the "remember personal info" to, you know, remember personal info, would be nice.

I'm not sure that this works. You're banking that high-interest readers are likely to make recommendations that marginal interest readers will appreciate, and thus grow the audience. I guess readership of mags like the Atlantic is low enough that you're already at very high-interest level already, so it probably helps ...

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | June 28, 2008 4:23 PM

Do you need a panel to say 'fix the damn server timeouts on comments'? Really?

That's awesome. And correct.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | June 28, 2008 4:29 PM

Regarding the server timeouts, based on the .php extension I'm going to assume they're using MT in non-static mode, akin to how systems like WP work. I.e., a a static HTML page isn't written out each time someone leaves a comment. If the case, the problem probably involves a very slow database server, a very slow connection thereto, or problems with the DB code.

As for the survey, I decided to help out. The phrase "cocooned sycophants" was used.

Posted by TLB | June 28, 2008 4:36 PM

I'm not debugging their stupid Web setup for free, TLB.

All Matt has to do is start complaining and get their IT assholes to fix the damn thing. I've seen some slow Web sites - some that are damn near unresponsive every time I happen to need to go to them. But this setup is ridiculously incompetent.

I think if every time one of us gets that server error, we email it to Matt, maybe he'll get a clue - somewhere about the 5,000th email - and start complaining to his bosses.

As it stands, the site looks like it's running on a Radio Shack TRS-80 - Model 1.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 28, 2008 7:36 PM

I'll offer my complaints now. (1) The browser shouldn't hang for 4 minutes after you try to post, often returning an error message. (2) Matt should stop quoting Drum if he isn't willing to link to him in the "Blogroll," which he still hasn't done. (3) The Max Sawicky link is still dead. (4) Quite generally, and not just because I've queried (2) and (3) before, it'd be nice if Matt didn't just use the comments to let people feel involved and increase traffic but actually appear to have done more than post, typos included, and never appear to have read or responded as he once did on TPM, but I realize he's a good blogger as these things go, and the promise of a community rather than a cheap OpEd on Web 2.0 is much overrated and won't be solved by him alone.

Posted by John Haber | June 28, 2008 8:02 PM

The phrase "cocooned sycophants" was used.

In 'occupation', Kelly? I know the spellcheck won't catch singular/plural typos, but repeating it for the benefit of your white supremacist fans just makes it worse.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 29, 2008 4:26 AM

I'm not really interested in being surveyed, but I will say this: I'd like to see more in-depth international coverage that's not related to the middle east. Specifically, things like Samantha Powers' article on Zimbabwe and Mugabe from a few years ago, or Mark Bowden in the Phillipines, or James Fallows on pretty much anything. I think it's what the Atlantic does better than anyone else.

Posted by omellet | June 30, 2008 9:11 AM