Brandon Muramatsu

muraPOI: September 12, 2011

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  • The UX of Learning: Tyler Tate at A List Apart writes an interesting article describing what we can learn from learning for UX design. Normally I keep the academic research into learning separated from my thinking about design (they’re not of course, I just segment them that way). Tyler’s take on Carol Kuhlthau’s study that describes a sequential nature of learning and how it can be supported by UX design in product-based/store websites is interesting. But it’s also interesting to consider how this can be applied to the other educational technology sites that I work on. He’s right, we tend to spend our time on the focused user, versus the browser or explorer.

    (StartupDigest Design, August 12, 2011)

  • The Complete Guide To Freemium Business Models: A take on what freemium might mean now, as more startups have tried to use it as a business model.

    (TechCrunch, September 4, 2011)

  • ReadSpeaker Launches Web-Based Math Audio Reader for Publishers: O’Reilly Radar has been using ReadSpeaker for a while now to enable audio playback on all their pages, I just played with it again and found out that the tech will read MathML formatted equations. It’s not great, but it does work. (My big annoyance is that it reads f(x) as f – open parentheses – x – close parenthesis instead of f-of-x. But the fact that it’s reading formatted math at all is an interesting step forward.) (They have plugins for various CMS’s so I’ll be playing around with this under WordPress I think.).

    (O’Reilly Radar)

  • A simple test for whether people will pay for news: The answer is, likely, very few people will pay for news online. But I think the question is the wrong one, a better question is what will people pay for any of the content that the author, Julie Starr, suggests be excluded for the test to pay for news online.

    (O’Reilly Radar, Four short links: 9 September 2011, September 9, 2011)

  • Subscription vs catchment: I think the general idea of sources as the primary destination is disappearing, certainly among my colleagues. I think Karl Fogel is right, that it’s endorsement that brings content to the fore and makes it worth reading on.

    Active source loyalty may just not be a thing anymore on the Net. Who evaluates sources as sources now? We’re looking more at the cloud of endorsements and references around the sources.

    I think I’m a little unique in that I still consume some information directly from sites as destinations. I just never got into the RSS thing, so I go looking for specific information. This might be because I would have added a million sites to my RSS reader and so it would have been a firehose anyway, and so would have just ignored it. Instead I’ve pre-filtered for me, and I *do* also use people/sites as my filtering mechanisms.

    (O’Reilly Radar, September 1, 2011)

  • Who Stole My Pictures Is a Firefox Extension That Helps You Locate Copied Images: Does an image search through multiple search engines as a Firefox extension.

    (Lifehacker, September 8, 2011)

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