World Usability Day (WUD) was started in 2005 to ensure that services and products important to life are easy to access and simple to use. This year’s event takes place on November 10 and the theme is Education: Designing for Social Change. Events will focus on how Design Education will help develop products and services that will impact social change.

Programs will examine all products and services used for teaching how usable design impacts the world, whether it’s close at hand (organizations), surrounding us (particular cultures/communities) or from a global view. . . how does something designed in China, Scotland, India or the United States, for example, have impact on other nations around the world? WUD will explore and celebrate Design Education – designing with an intentional outcome of sparking change in how people behave, communicate, and do things in the world; and examining the concept of cultures and how culture impacts usability.

Last year, more than 40,000 people in 44 countries participated in World Usability Day. Here are some ways you can get involved this year:

• Find an event near you
• Participate in a real-time crowdsourced usability test and other online events
• Share your story about usability
• Sign the World Usability Day Charter
• Join the Usability Professionals’ Association
• Become a member of the Usability and User Experience Community for the Society of Technical Communication

How do you make things easier through usability and user-centered design?

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is a novel-writing program where the goal is to write 50,000 words (about a 175-page novel) from November 1 to November 30. With the time limitation, writers are forced to simply write. No procrastinating, no editing, just writing.

If writing a novel doesn’t appeal to you, there are still benefits to using the event to fuel your own writing projects. Use the month of energy and excitement about writing to find the motivation to finish (or start) your dissertation, write that short story you have in mind, or polish those pieces you want to submit. Challenge yourself to blog every single day or create your own 30-day writing event. Use the month to try a style of writing that you may not have a chance to do in your professional job.

You can join NaNoWriMo at any time during November, and while it’s nice to ‘win’ by writing 50,000 words, it’s more about participating in a frenzied celebration of writing. Get ready for 30 days and nights of literary abandon!

You can join the project by writing about the significant women in your life—describing their lives, sharing photos, and writing stories in their memory. All women who are named will be added to the Internet Archive to ensure that they will be remembered in the future. For more information, visit the project’s site.

• Check out these cover designs from Chronicle Books that break the rules of grammar.
• Try your hand at the Grammar Scroller game.
• Enjoy grammar-related haiku tweets.
• Join the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.
• Teach others about grammar with resources from Grammaropolis and Grammar Bytes.
• Get daily doses of grammar (and humor) in 140 characters or less by following your favorite style guides and personalities. Some suggestions: @ChicagoManual, @APStylebook, @APA_style, @GrammarGirl, @GRAMMARHULK, and @FakeAPStylebook.

How are you celebrating National Grammar Day?

People need to connect with each other. We have more means than ever to communicate: phones, Internet, messaging and the printed medium. Technology that facilitates communication between people must be intuitive to use. It should have instructions that are easy to understand, and knobs, dials and buttons that do not require constant tuning. — Article 4, World Usability Day Charter

Advertising, storytelling, style guides—World Usability Day 2010 celebrates all the tools that improve and encourage communication in our daily lives. To get involved, share your experience and find an event near you.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. The goal is to write 50,000 words (about a 175-page novel) from November 1 to November 30. With the time limitation, writers are forced to simply write. No procrastinating, no editing, just writing.

It’s a challenge to put aside your doubts and to silence your inner editor, but it’s a great way to try a style of writing that you may not have a chance to do in your professional jobs. It’s also a worldwide writing event. So even if it’s two in the morning and you’re starting at your computer screen because you feel like you’ve run out of words, there’s some comfort in knowing that others are out there experiencing the same thing.

To help you focus on your writing, Scrivener is offering a special trial edition. The word processor and project management tool helps you outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing, and compose pieces of your text in isolation or in context. It’s available for both Mac OS and Windows, plus the 30-day trial period has been extended to December 7, with options to buy at a discount post-NaNoWriMo.

If writing a novel doesn’t appeal to you, there are still benefits to using the event to fuel your own writing projects. Use the month of energy and excitement about writing to find the motivation to finish your dissertation, write that short story you’ve got in mind, or start a new blog.

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, but you can join at any time during the month, and while it’s nice to “win” by writing 50,000 words, any amount of writing is better than never starting. Who’s in?

The freedom to read is what Banned Books Week is all about. From September 25 to October 2, the American Library Association is celebrating this freedom by calling attention to the harms of censorship with the help of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and readers like you.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

There will be a Banned Books Week Read-Out! in Chicago today, as well as events across the country in local libraries and bookstores. Not able to attend? Curl up with one of the banned and challenged books, or check out The New York Times’s 10 ways you can celebrate the freedom to read.

A panda walks into a cafe…

2003 was a good year for punctuation lovers. It was the year Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was released. It was also the year Jeff Rubin founded National Punctuation Day to celebrate the importance of proper punctuation.

“Successful people have good communication skills, and that includes knowing how to write properly,” says Rubin. “Punctuation counts. A misplaced comma can alter the meaning of a message.”

Today marks the seventh annual National Punctuation Day. Here are some ways you can celebrate:

• Write a punctuation haiku for this year’s contest.
• Listen to (or sing) the punctuation rap.
• Re-read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (available on Google Books).
• Share these tips for avoiding four common punctuation errors on resumes.
• Join The Great Typo Hunt.
• Download the first edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (1906) for free.
• Get a “How to use an apostrophe” or a “How to use a semi-colon” poster from The Oatmeal.

How will you be celebrating your favorite punctuation mark?

Suggested topics include:

• The ways digital archives enable creative engagement and innovative research
• The use of pop media (blogs, YouTube, social networking, etc.) to facilitate presentation, analysis, and study
• The use of digital research tools in the humanities

This is a great opportunity for undergrad students to develop and present their own projects. Submissions are due by June 14. Visit the Re: Humanities site for more information.

Based in Austin, SXSW draws those in the music, film, and interactive media industries for a week of presentations, networking, and all the Texas BBQ you can eat.

The interactive portion, dubbed SXSWi, brings together web developers, designers, bloggers, content producers, and new media entrepreneurs to share ideas about content strategy, social media marketing, publishing, emerging technologies, and more.

To get a sense of the SXSWi experience, we asked first-timers Lish Dorset and Kristen Byers to share their thoughts on the “spring break for geeks”.

As a newbie to SXSW this year, I blogged the conference for the Detroit Weber Shandwick office. While the entire week was amazing, attending fascinating panels and meeting hilarious folks, listening to Devo talk about rebranding themselves in the social media sphere was fantastic. I’m a big Devo fan and I love the idea that my idea might contribute to the greater whole. Because, after all, isn’t that what social media is all about?
— Lish Dorset, Digital Strategist

Wow…this was my first time attending SXSW, and I must say it was quite the whirlwind! No amount of research could have adequately prepared me for the awesomeness. My friend (and SXSW roommate) Nikki wrote a great post over on lalawag about being a SXSW first-timer, so I encourage you to check out her advice.

There was a great mix of panels, many of which catered to my professional and personal interests, and I attended loads of great sessions (and a couple not-so-great ones). Many reinforced the idea that geolocation services and mobile apps are hot trends at the moment. I brought back some ideas for my web strategy team about how we can improve the content of miis.edu. I think my favorite panels were “How the Other Half Lives: Touring the Digital Divide” and “Selling Subculture Without Selling Out”.

I definitely hope to attend again next year, although there are a few things I will do differently: research restaurants ahead of time, select panels based on speakers as opposed to topics/titles, and RSVP to more parties!

— Kristen Byers, New Media Development Specialist, Monterey Institute of International Studies

If you’re like me and the closest you got to SXSWi was your Twitter stream, be sure to check out the links above along with audio podcasts of the sessions and highlights on YouTube. Cowboy boots optional.