What is a superhero? Where did the idea of superhero come from? Who was the first super hero? Read about these interesting questions, and more at Kottke‘s.

I was surprised when I heard MBC were bringing The Simpsons to the Arab World, and did not think that would work out. According to WSJ, it did not. If you d it like me, you may enjoy this list of made-up words and expressions from the original show on Wikipedia.

Here is a list of the 100 best English language novels from 1932 to present by Time magazine.

Microsoft is working on a new user interface system for the next Microsoft Office, code-named Office 12. The new system is supposed to reverse the well-known WYSIWYG style that dominated the UI for the last twenty-five years. This new generation is called the results-oriented user interface, and it will help the users to benefit from the thousands of buried features in software like Word and Excel. Apple was behind the rise of WYSIWYG, but the question is: can Microsoft outperform Apple when it comes to design?

This could be a big thing for software development, because according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, “users often demand that other user interfaces work like Office.” However, David Galbraith disagrees with Nielsen, because “Microsoft has a terrible record at UI which is results oriented.” He thinks that Office biggest problem is that it was designed to deal a type of documents that belongs to past, and not with this new era of “email and weblogs, websites, shared web updatable financial data and multimedia mashups.”

A list of the 100 oldest .com names in the registry.

Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, writes on his monthly column about the top ten design mistakes for weblogs.

Moving Here is the name of an online project, organized by the British National Archives, involved collaboration between 30 organizations, and took four years to develop.

This project provides family history resources for Caribbean, Jewish, Irish, and Asian immigrant communities in the United Kingdom. With more than 150,000 documents, photographs, maps, sound recordings, and video clips, all available online for free, this massive project is a great achievement. It is a place where you can find the real history, written by regular individuals who came to that land carrying their dreams and hopes.