Protect your digital rights by educating yourself on SOPA and PIPA and speaking out against these proposed bills. Here are a handful of links to get you started:

• The EFF explains Internet Blacklist Legislation
• A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP
• Stop American Censorship
• SOPA Strike
• End Piracy, Not Liberty

Do your part to make sure this day never comes.

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?

This year’s theme is ‘Why I Write’. When someone asks you, “Why professional writing?” or “Why do you want to be a writer?”, how do you answer? When you explain what you love about writing, or why you are a writer, what do you say?

By reflecting on why you write and sharing it with others, you show the importance of writing. Tweet your answer with the hashtags #whyiwrite or #dayonwriting. Update your Facebook status with your answer. Use your blog, Tumblr, YouTube. Tell the world why you write and join in the celebration.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

— Steve Jobs, 2005

Steve Jobs’ vision and creative thinking changed the world and the way we think about technology and communication. Share your thoughts, memories, and condolences at rememberingsteve@apple.com.

• Work on yourself before looking for work
• Portfolio Showcase, Summer and Fall editions
• Little Black Dash
• The value of student internships
• Breaking with tradition: The creative resume
• Type matters
• Semi-collected thoughts on editing

Thank you for a wonderful year; we’ll see you in 2011!

When Monica Gaudio found out that a blog post of hers was published without her permission in Cooks Source Magazine, she contacted editor Judith Griggs to request apologies on Facebook and in the magazine, along with reasonable compensation in the form of a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. Not only did Griggs defend her use of Gaudio’s work, but she also suggested Gaudio pay for the editing done on the now portfolio-ready piece.

[…] the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence [sic] and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! Source

This has, as expected, enraged writers, editors, and readers across the internet who have been tweeting and posting to Cooks Source‘s Facebook page. Unfortunately, Gaudio’s story is not unique. The scandal has caused closer scrutiny of other content in the magazine, and has already found several more instances of plagiarism. In this digital age, copy+paste makes it easier than ever to plagiarize content, strip bylines or sources, and label it ethical publishing. But it also means that tracking down offenders and increasing awareness can be done through a series of clicks. Educate yourself about copyright and the internet and protect your content.

National Day on Writing highlights the variety of writing engaged in today, helps us to help others write better, and provides a collection for research on the current state of writing. To get involved, you can submit to the National Gallery of Writing. NCTE also has a great list of resources for writers, from finding a writing process to selecting pieces to share with others.

Secondly, thank you to all of our contributors and readers. It’s been a great two years sharing with the professional writing community, and in that spirit of sharing, beyondwords wants to give two readers a little something something.

Gift #1: So You Need a Typeface poster

Julian Hansen’s sweet “So You Need a Typeface” design is now available as a poster from Scribble. The 24×18″ print is done in metallic silver ink on Astrobrights Eclipse Black 80# Cover.

Gift #2: HTML5 for Web Designers

Author Jeremy Keith seeks to simplify the web’s new markup language in this 85-page guide, the first publication from A Book Apart.

How can you get one of these gifts? Just leave a comment telling us (1) what you like about beyondwords or what you’d like to see more of on the blog, and (2) which gift you’d like. We’ll draw two names at random on Monday, May 10 at 5pm EST.

Update: Thank you for all of the great feedback, and congratulations to John and Kathryn, winners of our giveaway!

Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.

Now, not only am I an avid Twitter user, but I am also married to a history buff who has repeatedly denounced Twitter as a “waste of time” because the data wasn’t being stored for research purposes. But Twitter’s API has limits on how many of your tweets you can personally archive using applications such as Tweetbook. The fact that now all future and past data from the social networking tool will be publicly archived is a huge step forward in terms of scholarly research.

But that’s not all—Google also announced Google Replay today.

Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter.

While Google Replay currently only searches tweets from the past few months, it will soon allow real-time search of the entire Twitter archive. As for the Library’s archive, Twitter says, “Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”

It’s still unclear as to why the Library of Congress has to wait and Google doesn’t, but that’s just one of many questions raised by Twitter’s digital preservation—like what my husband’s excuse for not tweeting will be now.

Directed by French designers and filmmakers H5, Logorama features approximately 2,500 logos. When Adrian Shaughnessy of Design Observer reviewed the film in January, the heavily branded world depicted in the short caused mixed emotions:

I was struck by how many of the logos on show are rather wonderful — fine examples of the art and craft of graphic design. But this only served to reminded me of the essential conundrum at the heart of being a graphic designer; namely that the job is to create seduction and allure for our clients regardless whether it is a true reflection of reality or not.

Check out the world of Logorama for yourself to see how many of the logos you recognize thanks to our branded reality. It’s currently available for sale on iTunes, and you can also watch a preview on YouTube or Vimeo.