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.

We saw the NYC Condom campaign and thought it’d be worth a post. It’s edgy, speaks to a target audience, builds upon a widely known brand (NYC subway), and isn’t offensive to non-targets.

We’re just jealous because one of us proposed the double-entendre slogan “Get some” for a student organization back in college.

Check out the site when you get a sec. And, if you’re in Manhattan and need some free rubbers, well now you know where to go.

NYC Dept. of Health gets an A in health class this semester. Nice work.

Here’s Hillary’s:

Obama’s:

Rudy’s:

Edwards’:

We couldn’t help but notice how much more 2.0 Edwards’ site was then the rest. What to think of it? Well, judging from this, a little bandwagony and kool aid drinky.

But then we came across McCain’s and decided that McCain Space was just…so…inviting…

Well, if those guys are doing it, why can’t Mitt?

The brand marketers over at Bacon’s thought that it was in their best interest to take on that battle. In an e-mail message yesterday from CEO Steve Newman, the announcement came fresh with a new logo atop a glassy bar of blue in the header.

Our new name, Cision, reinforces the distinct but related strength of our worldwide organization. It projects our position as a global leader and our commitment to serving our clients seamlessly.

How does a new logo, name, typeface, and colors do this again? We’re big fans of cool branding over here at the pulp – don’t get us wrong – but that explanation is ripe with empty words that are so non-specific, we don’t even want to read them.

The best brand connection is between you and me, 1:1. Don’t make us feel like we’re minions in a sea of ambiguity.

Bacon’s has (edit: had) so much cool brand equity that it could have played off of really well and communicate its transition to a global leader with innovative products for the PR and greater media markets.

For example, the image that a lot of seasoned PR pros still have of the company is that giant directory of media contacts that you can get for some ridiculous fee. Play off of that – shred that puppy to bits and morph it into a Web-based app. Show how many trees they’re saving now. Send out free bacon-for-a-year gifts to best clients. Have fun. Instead, they were always pumping up the communications cycle and its offerings along the way.

A visit over to the now conglomerate’s Web site is just as stale and depressing as the note from the CEO today. So we stared at the logo a bit more and asked to ourselves: is it pronounced siz-e-on or siz-shun? The best we can figure out it’s like a snipped version of the word decision.

One word: booo.

Right around the same time, Vocus reaffirmed its outlook on the year and is shaking the trees with a follow-on stock offering of up to 60M shares.

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.]

That’s what we think Coke is up to in its new packaging for Coke Plus, a vitamin enriched soda.

Check it out:

Here’s Centrum:

Via NYT.

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.

That’s what Richard Houng’s company exploited when it decided to license the Westinghouse logo from CBS to slap on lower-priced flat-panel TVs.

BusinessWeek ran the article last week, which brought to light the thin margins that manufacturers are making these days on LCD TVs.

In there, however, is a great point about the power of branding and exploiting consumers’ perceptions. From the story:

Like just about everyone else checking out the flat-panel TVs at Best Buy in Manhattan, graphic designer Roy Gantt came in coveting a Philips (PHG), Sony (SNE), or Panasonic (MC). But after seeing the price tags, he figured a Westinghouse might be a better buy. At $800, the Westinghouse 32-in. set seems like a steal compared with $950 to $1,400 for better-known brands. Plus, the name sounds comfortingly familiar. “I think they make home appliances—things like that,” says Gantt.

He’s right, but that’s a different Westinghouse. In fact, the name didn’t appear on U.S. TVs for more than three decades. Then in 2003, a startup founded by two Taiwanese-American entrepreneurs licensed the brand and distinctive W logo from CBS Corp. (CBS) subsidiary Westinghouse Electric Corp. Today, Westinghouse Digital ranks No. 5 in liquid-crystal-display TVs in North America, with 7.7% of the market, according to researcher iSuppli Corp.

Now, if this guy stares at this screen long enough and then looks at a white wall, what colors will he see?

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.

Gotcha! Those kids at Engadget are so sneaky.

Can’t wait to get one? Print this out and stare at the countdown. Trust us, those are for real.