Improving the online edition? Or just going around in circles?

Via Stuck on the Palmetto, news that the Miami Herald is now offering a new version of the online newspaper, created using Olive's ActivePaper technology. It displays the newspaper pages as designed and creates links from ads to advertisers' web sites. Demo available here.

'Stuck' links to a review of the new service, which ends up being more a review of miamiherald.com, at Habla Mierda. Says Habla Mierda:

So instead of taking a page from the New York Times internet department and hiring one of the best interactive designers in the business, they instead buy half-assed software that basically amounts to scanned jpegs linked to each other.

Pardon me for being confused, but the Herald already had this capability, in a PDF pages version, several years ago. According to the MyHerald.com website, they are ending this service and anyone who wants to continue getting full page versions will need to reregister. MyHerald offered two versions to scan the news paper online, the full pages in PDF, and a 'Quickbrowse' version of the Herald, using Marc Fest's creation.

So...what's been improved? (Oh, yes. The ad experience.)

Speaking of the Herald, interesting viewer sidebar I hadn't seen before: it shows who's reading the story and where they came from. I show up as from 'Asheville NC' via SotP. Hmmm.