Harry Brignull has been posting some great quick tips for doing mobile usability testing including how to record from two webcams using an application called AmCap and how to craft inexpensive usability testing sleds for mobile phones.
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/10/05/mobile-usability-testing-tip-recording-from-two-webcams
Visualizing.org looks like an exciting new community devoted to information design and sensemaking--making sense of complex issues through data and design. An excerpt from their about page describes the site:
It's a place to showcase work, get feedback, ensure that your work is seen by lots of people and gets used by teachers, journalists, and conference organizers to help educate the public about various world issues. Visualizing is also a free resource to search for data. Use Visualizing to keep up with and be inspired by the latest work from other designers and design schools. You can learn about new visualization tools, blogs, books and other resources here.
Visit visualizing.org and share your work or get data to start participating.
Harry Brignull's Dark Patterns is a pattern library dedicated to user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. He describes the site he created to address this issue:
Dark Patterns ... are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind. The purpose of this site is to catalogue various common types of Dark Pattern, and to name and shame organizations that use them.
Harry's talk at UX Brighton 2010 illustrates examples of brands that are using dark patterns including opting customers in to options they didn't explicitly choose, and adding items to their shopping carts. The talk calls for a code of ethics among professionals in the user interface design industries, and for professional associations to acknowledge that these practices are unethical. This does seem to me as simple a principle as a professional and professional association could adopt, in keeping with the familiar phrase from the principle of ethics for Medicine, "First, do no harm."