New E-zine

Dirt Rag announced the arrival of their DigiRag today. DigiRag is a Flash supported web-version of the Magazine, that enables web surfers to "read" (more on this later) the magazine and flip through the pages just as if they had bought it at their local bike shop. It's in there in it's entirety, including ads with active links. Maurice Tierney, one of Dirt Rag's founders, is quoted in the announcement: "Our goal is to bolster our online presence and to have the complete content of Dirt Rag, and the brand, available in as many formats that make sense." The Dirt Rag team benefits from the added exposure of ads by doing this and the readers benefit as well. It's a good step forward for Dirt Rag in my opinion, and it's cool that you can "read" (again, more on this later) the whole mag just by signing up. What is not cool is the fact that the necessary sign in info is a little too detailed for my peace of mind. Not that you can't fake your info, but just the fact that they ask you for your address and phone number, bothers me a little bit. The reason for this is that they use the same account for the DigiRag as their Merchandise account, in another suave marketing/income bolstering stunt. The print world is tough though, and you do what you can to survive. Power to them. The fatal flaw in the Digi Rag is that once you come across a page you'd like to read(yes now we'll get to it) , you have to zoom in to read it, and once you zoom in you cant move within the page. So what you get is a quarter of a page with no way of reading the rest, this is annoying beyond belief, and made my morning coffee bitter as hell. I'm sure they'll fix this, but at the time being, the DigiRag is useless.