Coming hot on the heels of the BBC introducing social bookmarking, I was quite keen to see what social media or Web 2.0 features the new service offered subscribers. Suffice it to say that the initial experience has proved to be underwhelming and frustrating in judiciously equal parts.

So, what is the new digital version all about? It is touted thus:

[...] every page, every section and every advertisement is presented. It provides you with a view of a newspaper page just like the print version, with the same layout and realistic page turning technology.
Dominion Post (my emphasis).

Aside from the fact that it looks just like the paper tossed haphazardly into your shrubbery every morning, what exactly is the point of this exciting new innovation?

Whatever it is, it is definitely not performance. It is slow to load, at around 40-60 seconds per page on dial-up (actually, 44 kbps when tested), and with Internet speeds what they are in this country, that is a non-trivial consideration. And as it is essentially just a series of images, it is completely useless to anyone using assistive technologies.

Even though there is a mobile version, I can’t see why you would want to download a series of large (and expensive) images to your phone – that sort of functionality is the whole point of HTML.

In any event, it is a moot point. Despite filling out a long and complex registration form (for a purportedly free trial) and using Opera Mini (v2.0.4) on a late model Nokia, I was unable to get past the sign-on stage. Frustratingly, I was just cycled back to the same ‘New user’ screen after each apparently successful attempt at completing the form. Now that was helpful.

Someone there obviously has read about Web 2.0, though. They have finally added RSS feeds to this edition of the paper. Bewilderingly, the HTML version of the paper still lacks this feature. Well, perhaps it is not so difficult to understand. There are two feed options on offer: the front page and the full paper.

This is less a reason to rejoice than you would expect. The front page feed yields a respectable 8-10 items. The only other option, the full feed, has over the last week delivered between 140-200 items per day into the aggregator. Saturday’s (at right) is 149. And the feed is, obviously, only refreshed once per 24 hour period. So at the beginning of the day you get 180-odd items dumped into your reader – it’s not so much a river of news as an overwhelming flood…

Why would you pour money into building something that is redundant on so many levels? It doesn’t work as a web site, because it excludes so many people. It doesn’t work as a news channel because you can’t access it (easily, or at all) via your feed reader or mobile phone.

What is it for? Well, if I was a shareholder I would be asking exactly that question. It looks like it is a rather lame attempt to push offline advertising onto online consumers.

It also looks like a ringing confirmation of the suspicion I expressed last year, that Fairfax executives have absolutely no clue about state-of-the-art online newspapers now, or where online news is headed in the short to medium term.