The Future of Digital Editions
Last week saw this review of Ceros and a little interview published by mequoda.com. It’s nice to see that the press agrees with our customers!
Something else we’ve noticed about the Ceros platform, in comparison to other digital magazine providers, is that their look is extremely clean and their interface is intuitive. Not only is it search engine optimized, easy to browse and delivered digitally, it is as classy and elegant as the brand it is representing.
If you have a minute, read the entire review of Ceros.
Valentine’s Day saw us at Publishing Expo ‘08 - although the event could easily have been described as Digital Edition Expo ‘08 as there were (by my count) 13 vendors with ‘page turning’ software, a big increase from last year’s 3!
While there was some talk about business models and monetising online publications there was little real insight into the future of Digital Magazines or how they sit in the larger web… One vendor even suggested that trying to fool Google
was the best way to get a decent Page Rank!
Ceros Media Alternatives
Today I was trying out Yahoo!’s new Search Assist feature and was rather amused to see that as I was typing in Ceros Media
one of the suggested searches was Ceros Media Alternatives…
Searching for it didn’t actually return any relevant results of course… as there aren’t any! 
So if you’re looking for a platform to publish your own digital editions, then head on over to www.cerosmedia.com!
Manson in Jelly Fish!
Check out Marilyn Manson talking about Lindsey Lohan in this weeks Jelly Fish…
http://natmags.cerosmedia.com/1T467be345aad1f012.cde/page/28
Lies, damn lies and not so Unique Users…
Recently, while working on Ceros, I’ve had to become very involved with the auditing process of web sites - everything from how statistical data is recorded, the ways to measure it and the vocabulary used in describing the results. While it may seem obvious, there are very strict rules and regulations about what you can and can’t do… the reason for this is because these numbers are the life blood of the commercial web - after all, if no one’s looking at your site, why bother?
In the UK if you want a third party certificate for the statistics of your web site then the minimum mandatory metric you have to declare is your total Unique Users for the period being audited. But this metric is under increasing scrutiny by the industry as many consider it unreliable and misleading.
The metric is misleading because the best it can actually measure is unique web browsers. Most sites use cookies to ‘tag’ browsers as being unique, but this is no indication of how many Users that browser has or conversely if those Users have multiple browsers (IE and Fire Fox) or multiple devices (Desktop PC and Mobile Device).
Interestingly it’s ‘illegal’ to rely on cookies alone to measure Unique Users, which is why a lot of tools like Google Analytics are un-auditable. The non cookie based approach to counting Unique Users is to concatenate the device’s IP Address and User Agent to form a unique id, this is something sites must fall back on for Users who reject cookies. This is because users who set their browsers to reject cookies will appear to be a different Unique User every time they make a request to a site that relies on cookies alone, which will obviously over state the statistics (both Bounce Rate and Unique Users).
The biggest problem with the Unique User metric though has been widely reported and it’s a group of people who have been christened Serial Resetters.
Who are they? They’re a group of users who for what ever reason (mostly concerns about privacy) delete all their cookies on a regular basis which, for analytical purposes, is worse than people who out right reject cookies because they can’t be detected and catered for with User Agent/IP address. But there’s an increasing problem with even that…
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have allowed plug-ins and add-ons to show up in Internet Explore’s User Agent. Which would be fine but people like to fiddle with things which means of the course of an audit period it is entirely possible for a browser’s User Agent to change as well as any cookies installed! Which means that even ignoring the problems counting cookied users there is still potential for the Unique Users of a site to be overstated!
So, what is to be done? Either we’ve all got to except a permanent unique identifier in our browsers (which isn’t going to happen) or the industry has to put more emphasis on session based metrics like Visits or Page Impressions.
Ceros and Monkey Mag on C|Net!
(near the end)
Page Turning From Around The World
This week saw two more sites that I look at a lot get a make over… only this time, ironically, it was a make over with page turning.
Is this the rise of Page Turning? Is this the end of the web as we know it? Umm… No. But it is interesting to see the return of the ‘page’ metaphor in some main stream sites.
How does this effect Ceros? Not much. If anything it helps us, as it exposes the idea of having to turn pages to navigate through content to more and more people.
I’m not going to comment on the point of page turning as I’ve written a mammoth article about ‘it’ and Digital Editions, which I will get around to posting soon - so in the mean time check out alanis.com and Mason’s Album Art Work.