As of today, the Atlasphere has over 20,000 admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels in the member directory, which is our biggest milestone in years.

When we launched the site in 2003, I remember thinking that if the site was really successful we might have as many as 20,000 members from all over the world. It’s quite surreal to see that this has come to pass.

Those of you who have only joined recently may enjoy reading about the Atlasphere’s origins.

My thanks to all of you who have supported the site, either through being one of our original sponsors, buying a subscription, inviting your friends to join, or sending us suggestions for how to improve the site.

We are always thrilled to hear from couples who meet through the Atlasphere and fall in love.

The newest couple to contact us, Brian Iarossi and Jen Martin, agreed to let us post this photo from their wedding last weekend. These two look amazing together!

Congratulations to Brian and Jen.

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.