Every year since 1952, the The New York Times’ Book Review has asked a panel of judges to make a selection from among the several thousand children’s book published that year. This years’ list contains a broad selection of styles from leading illustrators such as Bob Staake and Charlotte Voake.

An invite to the private beta of Microsoft’s user-generated video site Soapbox arrived in my inbox today. A direct rival to Google’s YouTube, is Soapbox yet another example of too little too late from Redmond?

The welcome screen upon login promised much. Soapbox certainly looks more appealing than YouTube:

(Click the screenshot above to see a larger version).

Proceeding to the main application interface, I wasn’t disappointed. Navigation throughout is a very fluid, Flash-based experience, which works excellently for video-based content.

Searching for content proved very easy: both category selection and free text search were very responsive, and delivered appropriate results. As one would expect from any aspiring Web 2.0 application, all search results are delivered without refreshing the page.

The video player seems more refined that YouTube’s: the core controls are simple and clear, and the tools for rating, tagging and sharing content are equally straight forward. However, it does suffer one fairly irritating flaw; the fullscreen link fails miserably in Firefox on OSX, but as this is in beta, it’s likely this will be fixed prior to launch.

(Click the screenshot above to see a larger version).

Soapbox looks like it could be a real contender. Microsoft are sure to throw their considerable weight behind it, but they’ll have a real fight on their hands given YouTube’s total dominance in the field of user-generate video.

This site features a beautiful selection of sculptures made from single sheets of A4 paper.

The evergreen Helvetica is celebrated in a new documentary film by Gary Hutswit, scheduled for release in 2007, the 50th anniversary year of the typeface. The film promises to offer a valuable insight into the history of this ubiquitous font.

No trailer has been released yet, but you can sign up to the mailing list to find out more about the film and screening dates.

Yahoo! have launched a radical overhaul of their site this week. The emphasis seems to be on usability and speed of navigation: the homepage still features a large amount of information, but it now appears in a more user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing format.

Disappointingly, the homepage does not validate, but it functions very well with no page styling. I appreciate that Yahoo! are at the mercy of advertisers, and their site needs to display a tremendous quantity of information, but one would hope they’d take a positive lead with accessibility and W3C standards.

New features of the Yahoo! site include:

• Searching can now be narrowed to a specific area by clicking on tabs for images, video, audio etc. (similar to Google’s homepage which shows images, Google Groups, Froogle and so on).
• Favourite items, information and searches can be stored in the navigation, accompanied by reasonably pleasing little icons.
• A “Yahoo! Personal Assistant” can provide you with a quick, at-a-glance view of what’s happening in your (Yahoo!-orientated) world.

activeCollab is an impressive open source clone of Basecamp. As you can see from the screenshot, it looks remarkably like Basecamp, even down to the navigation being nearly identical.

This application has a great deal of potential. I’m a huge fan of Basecamp - whilst activeCollab is clearly missing some of Basecamp’s headline features (most notably Writeboards), the fact that it’s free and installable on a third-party server is a real boon. As it’s open source we’re sure to see a host of user-generated add-ons and improvements integrated in the near future.

The release of activeCollab is sure to encourage (force?) 37signals to innovate further to maintain their user base.