November 8, 2007 – World Usability Day

World Usability Day 2007 will take place on November 8th with this year’s focus on healthcare. Started in 2005, the event is aimed at making “the services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use.”

The goals for 2007 include growing the number, size and types of the events worldwide. This includes: adding more events that not only provide education about usability, but work to effect change by taking the message to the average citizen, offering additional webcasting features that enable World Usability Day to be even more accessible and increasing the volunteers, supporters and sponsors for the event. In order to accomplish this, we need more event leaders and volunteers as part of the World Usability Day team.

Some issues that will be addressed are: new technologies, drug research, emergency disaster planning, functionality of hospitals, and much more.

To learn more and find information on how you can become involved, visit the World Usability Day website at http://www.worldusabilityday.org/.

HighBeam Research to launch new website, Newser.com

UPDATE October 30, 2007: Newser — an Online News Service from HighBeam Research and Michael Wolff — Debuts Today

This Tuesday, October 30, HighBeam Reseach will release Newser.com, a news website that creators Patrick Spain and Michael Wolff hope will change the current trend of content aggregation.

Newser stories run approximately 120 words in length, and feature photos licensed from the Associated Press as well as links to the original story source. Readers can also determine their mix of hard and soft stories through a “slider box,” which Spain hopes will introduce “different ways of how to perceive news.” The site, which was designed by Chicago-based Duo Consulting, also features the top stories of the day and categorizes news by topic and publication date.

So what makes Newser different from others like Google or Yahoo? The answer: Humans. Instead of using “spiders” or “crawlers” built off of algorithms to gather information from the web, an entire staff has been hired to contribute to content found on Newser.com.

“Nobody is really aggregating news in a meaningful way,” said Spain, 55, who ran and sold business-information service Hoovers.com. “Google in a robotic way [aggregates stories] from hundreds of brands and sources. But it doesn’t have any editorial zest.”

NewspaperARCHIVE.com provides free global warming research tool

The topic of global warming has infiltrated the media, industry and politics in the U.S. and throughout the world. NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest online historic newspaper database, has created a special collection dedicated to global warming. The Global Warming Newspaper Archive, found at http://www.globalwarmingarchive.com/Home.aspx, allows users to search through 50,000 archived newspaper pages to find articles about global warming. The archive also includes a timeline of events relating to the Earth’s climate and a historical overview of the topic.

With the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election right around the corner, the topic of global warming is on the list of candidates’ issues to address. Regardless of the current fundamental argument – are humans causing the earth to warm? – the earth is changing and education, including the history of the planet’s climate, is important.

By searching the Global Warming Newspaper Archive, you can explore past perspectives on the “greenhouse effect” and also research what many scientists, politicians and those in the media had to say about the concept. Newspapers are a great source of information and NewspaperARCHIVE.com has released this socially relevant archive so that we can all benefit from information it contains.