One of the things I hope to accomplish here is to showcase the many faces of usability, the work being done and why. There are so many more people tooting the usability horn besides Jared Spool and Jakob Nielsen, or the funny author Steve Krug who wrote "Don't Make Me Think!"
Here's a site called WebCredibility.org, by Stanford University.
From this site you'll find more research, meet the people doing this research and learn some of the trends. I like sites like this and articles written by researchers because they get into the heads of website users. Since this is whom we're ultimately building for, it helps to know what they want.