MAKE Magazine Survey

I'm a subscriber to MAKE magazine. Yesterday I received (via email), an invitation to participate in a survey.

It started with:

"We here at MAKE could use your help to better understand you -- how you use our magazine and related resources, as well as the kinds of DIY activities you are interested in. We want to get a better sense of who reads MAKE to make sure all of our content, from editorial to advertising/sponsorship, is as relevant to you as possible."

I immediately thought uh oh. From past experience, whenever I've seen a survey request such as this, it's usually because the a critical business decision needs to be made. (That or some over eager person in marketing is trying to justify their existence).

I then starting wondering when was the last time I got an issue of the magazine. It was just before the Maker Faire back in mid May. Phew! At least it's not more than three months and therefore late (4 issues a year). Hopefully the MAKE magazine is still a going concern.

It was a well written survey. A tad long, but all good questions. Nice to see you weren't forced to answer everything (a condition that drives me crazy with some surveys and quite often will force me to give up on them).

I only have two very minor concerns with the magazine:

1. As a subscriber, I would like to get my copy of the magazine before I see it in stores. Other magazines I've subscribed to can do that. It's shouldn't be hard.

2. As a subscriber, it's possible to view the magazine online (in digital format). You can then get to the articles you are interested in, view them or optionally print them. When I initially tried the digital edition (probably a year ago or even longer), I seem to remember you could download individual articles as a PDF. My trivial complaint here, is that rather than having to go visit a website, it would be nice to have this feature again, or even better, to be able download the whole magazine instead, just once as a large PDF. I can understand that O'Reilly might be concerned with piracy here, and that might be the reason for not allowing this to happen. No biggie.

Two of the questions were interesting.

It gave a list of other websites that have similar format, and asked me to indicate how often I visited them. Most of them I'd come across at one time or another, but there were a few new ones to me. More new places to look now.

There was a similar question for podcasts. Now I'm not a podcast person. I'd rather read about something then listen or watch it. That's probably just an artifact of how old I am, and what I'm used to. Perhaps I should really give MAKE-like podcasts a try. What with the flickering gnat-like attention span of the current generation measured in seconds instead of minutes (or minutes instead of hours), this seems to be part of the wave of the future.

[Technorati Tag: Links]

( Aug 07 2007, 08:40:50 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [4]