Forget battling with autoshapes in MS Office and Visio – now Forbes.com is offering a Wiki org chart maker.

With the turnover of executives being so high, it’s hard for research and media organizations to keep up with who’s in what position. We’ll see if the collective Web community can do a better job.

See if your company is there or browse publicly traded ones if, ya know, get the hankering for checking out some org charts in your spare time.

Via Lifehacker.

It’s getting to be crunch time for taxes.

If you haven’t started yet, you better get crackin’.

We came across this post and thought it might be helpful for navigating through all the online tax prep offerings that are out there.

You could save a few bucks and take a bit of the sting off the pain of realizing how much money you gave to Uncle Sam in ‘06.

Need some copy and wonder where you can score some dummy text?

Head on over to www.loremipsum.de and you can get as much as you need.

It’s a free service for copywriters, graphic designers, and more.

Interested in its history? Read on:

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero’s ‘de Finibus’ 1.10.32, which begins ‘Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…’ [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

Head on over to USAtoday.com to get a completely redesigned home page fraught with the latest social elements that (might) make reading the newspaper online just a little bit more interactive.

We’re not going to tell you what they did, you can check it out on your own.

We liked the welcome note that explained the new approach and community features. That way, when grandma and grandpa click on over they’ll understand that it’s still the same old content – it’s just all rejiggered on ya.

To summarize, it’s USA Today meets digg meets facebookish youtube thingy, well, awkward design.

We never really go for USA Today anyway. The colors are just a little too bright on our delicate eyes in the morning.

Today they just might have totally redeemed themselves.

Since many of you have commented on how you like the tools that we highlight here on the pulp, here’s another one for you:

Weather.com unveiled a new – surprise surprise – Flash-based interactive map that adds several new dimensions to pretending you’re a weatherman/woman. You can change the transperency level, toggle clouds on and off, zoom in-and-out, and more.

Check it out on the home page of your local forecast. That is, of course, you can get there in less than 3 clicks.

If you’re just looking to quickly check out a stock or index, however, there are some new tools to use that enable you to crunch stock data until your eyes start to sizzle. These new tools are pretty slick and may even take the slightest big of edge off of those losses from Tuesday.

First up is Yahoo! Finance.

Yahoo recently launched a beta version of an interactive Flash-based chart system that allows users to toggle between stocks, indexes, curves, periods of time, and more.

Factiva also recently announced similar capability within its offerings. You have to pay for it though.

When you’re done with that, head on over to LeveragedSellOut.com for another take on Wall Street.

This just in:

XM Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: XMSR) and SIRIUS Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: SIRI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement, under which the companies will be combined in a tax-free, all-stock merger of equals with a combined enterprise value of approximately $13 billion, which includes net debt of approximately $1.6 billion.

…

The combination creates a nationwide audio entertainment provider with combined 2006 revenues of approximately $1.5 billion based on analysts’ consensus estimates. Today the companies have approximately 14 million combined subscribers.

Source: XM Radio

What does this mean to all of us satellite radio subscribers? Howard just got a whole lot richer.

Thanks for the tip, Jess!

We’re really diggin’ Daylife’s new look and the site is quickly becoming one of our favorites.

If you haven’t visited the site before, it’s worth a drop on by. There are different ways to enjoy what Daylife is all about – rounding up some top stories from the week and presenting them in way that makes you interested in them. They accomplish this by making full use of great photography.

In short, our quick analysis is that Daylife capitalizes on the premise that people love visuals, that less is more, and that personalized news delivery has an inkling of hope for the future. Daylife’s maximizes the use of imagery to enable visitors to get a sense of a story’s essence without actually having to read beyond the headline.

Head on over to the My World section and you can sign up to start getting custom news delivered to a personal page based on ratings that you assign to news items (along the lines of a NetFlix rating). In there, you also get a great visual display of tagged thumbnails of big newsmakers that enables you to drill down even further to find what you want amid the onslaught of daily coverage.

There are many studies that have analyzed consumption of media based on selection and consumption preferences and behaviors, but it’s not until now with services such as Daylife or Google’s personalized news recommendations that we’ve been able to see if we like it or not.

While we’re excited about Daylife, it’s too early to draw too many conclusions just yet. Our only initial criticism, however, is that Daylife’s homepage has gone a little too far down the road of weeding out the perception of content en masse. We’ll keep using it and see if it works into our daily surfing habits and urge you to do the same.

Via Signal vs. Noise.

Domain tasting takes advantage of a loophole in the registration process for domains (i.e. www.prpulp.com or www.microsoft.com) by allowing someone to purchase one for five days and give it a test drive before returning it to the registration holder for no fee. The policy was created to enable sloppy typers who misspell a domain name and accidentally buy it to return it for no fee.

What’s happening today, however, is that sites are sprouting up at the rate of 4 million per day and are tried out or tasted. They names are often one or two letters off from major companies’ such as www.vorizonringtone.com and are then littered with adwords that point back to the real site (such as www.verizon.com). When someone clicks on the link, the owner of the domain gets paid while the legitimate company gets billed for a click-through.

One could argue that the business is perfectly legit – it gets people to the site they were looking for in the first place. Others see it as a shady practice that creates instability on the Internet.

They’re always an opportunity in the muck though. VeriSign, the company that controls the .com and .net domain extensions just launched a new service:

[It's] called “digital brand and fraud protection” that in part helps corporations combat trademark infringement through practices like tasting. The service costs $100,000 to $400,000 a year.

Via BusinessWeek.

Now that you’re inspired by the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, you need to be able to graph your data. Google spreadsheets isn’t quite there yet, so you need some help.

Enter Swivel.

Swivel is a social-based online graphing system that can also make your private data look good. It starts to cost money when you don’t want to share – kind of like a punishment for resisting the 2.0 movement.