In the great rush to take advantage of all the new possibilities the web offers, we often fail to reach beyond the familiar. Our "strategic thinking" looks more replicative than revolutionary. Consider how many of these failed technologies you've seen: A "virtual counter person" greeting visitors of a retail site.
Web visitors do not want the same experience as they have in store. At least, not in that way. That helpful avatar either isn't or is dipping into the uncanny valley. And it's not that "the technology just isn't there yet". It's that people don't want to interact with your site that way. Online magazine forces you to "turn pages" just like an offline magazine.
Do you know why we turn pages of physical magazines? Because we have to. Not because we want to. You'd be better off putting a screen and a keyboard on a magazine. Oh wait. Business card-shaped CDs.
Granted, it's been almost a decade since I've seen these. Maybe they're all dead now. The concept was silly, but they sold like hotcakes. Now if we can just kill off physical business cards all together. The best inventions are transformative. They make use of new technological advances to advance something, often times convenience. There's that pesky arrow again. There are good reasons why: