With Gliffy you can do flow charts, floor plans, landscape designs, technical drawings, all sorts of things. Gliffy turns your ideas into pictures. They have shape libraries and a fairly intuitive interface that helps you to create diagrams pretty quickly. The fact that the diagrams can be shared online opens up a host of possibilites for online collaboration, and no more sending large, awkward attachments to the people you are working with.

Gliffy Basic is free, and Gliffy Premium is $30 for the year, so you can try it out for a while, and then decide whether you need such refinements as more extensive libraries and email support. They even do a neat demo that gives you a good idea of what Gliffy can do, and there are forums where you can seek advice from other users.

I’m looking forward to writing my next report, as it will now have some impressive illustrations, with the help of Gliffy.

From cars to gadgets, DIY to aviation, from the military to the environment, and plenty of entertainment and gaming, popsci.com offers “the future now”, and all the science information that you need in a nutshell.

The images are superb too – see what happens when you create lightning-like effects in a block, see pictures taken on the ground on Mars, and take a look at possible warships of the future. Popsci’s extensive Photo Galleries give some intriguing vistas onto the technology of the future, cutting edge research, and micro- and nano-scopic images.

You can read about Richard Branson’s attempts to create space tourism, about issues concerning how science is funded, and about the latest scientific research.

Popsci is the website of the magazine Popular Science, and the site makes a highly engaging browse for those interested in science, the gadget geek, gamers and those who just want to be better informed on issues relating to science and technology.

Jon Chase’s “The Grouse” is a great column for if you want to enjoy a right good rant about the cost of inkjet refills, social networking sites, batteries that cannot be re-charged, and other stuff.

There are some interesting points made in the environment section too – like how it might be better to just take shorter showers than invest in those eco-friendly light bulbs that give off about as many photons as a glow worm.

Popsci is definitely a site that I will be coming back to – it doesn’t just inform, it entertains.

But now it’s time to think again. VisualCV takes the traditional resume, and makes it come alive with video, pictures, a portfolio of your best work samples, and any other supporting documents that you care to include. Informational pop-ups provide background data on the companies you’ve worked at, and the universities and colleges you have attended. Add to this the fact that you can securely share different versions of your resume with your own network of employers, colleagues and friends, and control who sees what.

VisualCV certainly takes the whole concept of the CV up a level, and the result is a lively, vibrant and informative online document, that is pretty well guaranteed to impress.

One quibble might be that you might just as well do your own website, but VisualCV offers you the chance to put your resume online in a somewhat easier manner, and in a standardised format that makes a professional looking online resume easy to produce.

VisualCV is still at the beta stage, so if you are job hunting, it could be worth giving it a go. The proof of the pudding will be the job offers.

So, the latest in the Microsoft vs Google saga is that the giant Microsoft has made a bold $44.6bn bid for Yahoo in a deal that would create an online advertising colossus big enough and powerful enough to rival market leader Google.

Microsoft arrived rather late in the day to the internet advertising market, and so is keen to gain a good foothold in this area. Microsoft is offering Yahoo shareholders a tempting $31 a share, and this deal would be one of the largest dotcom takeovers since the merger of AOL and Time Warner.

Only last year Yahoo turned down an offer from Microsoft. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, says:

“Our companies really do share a vision for the potential of online services and advertising specifically. When you combine the strengths of our two companies the result will be an incredibly efficient and competitive offering for consumers, for advertisers and for publishers.

“A year ago the Yahoo management team told us it was not really the right time to discuss an acquisition, we believed then in the benefits of combining the two companies and we believe now in those benefits more than ever.”

Yahoo said that it had received the unsolicited proposal and that its board would evaluate it carefully, bearing in mind the interests of its sharholders.

This news has boosted share prices in London, with the FTSE 100 going back through the 6,000 level. And on Wall Street, shares in Yahoo have risen by almost 50%, to $28.26, while Microsoft has fallen by 5% to $30.94. Google too has dropped by 9% to $512.90.

It seems that Yahoo’s position has weakened somewhat over the past year with repeated delays to the launch of its new advertising platform Panama, and plans to axe 1,000 jobs following a drop in profits.

Meanwhile Google has, as ever, surged ahead in the online search market, and additionally has made moves into the wider online advertising market.

All this just confirms that, for the big players at least, online advertising is definitely where it is happening at the moment. And, especially where Microsoft and Google are concerned, it’s always intriguing to see what happens next.

Mahalo means “thank you” in Hawaiian, and now it means a great deal more than that. Mahalo.com is a human search engine, or web directory, which was launched in alpha test in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis, and January 2008 saw the project go beta. What the site offers is the tracking and building of hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular words that are being searched. This makes it different from the algorithmic search engines such as the ever-popular and ever-loved Google.

So what is a human search engine exactly? Working on one of these sounds like a pretty labourious and never-ending enterprise. Well, a human search engine is a type of search engine that uses human participation to filter search results and help its users clarify their search request. They provide users with a limited number of relevant results, whereas the traditional search engines return a great number of results some of which may be relevant, and a substantial number which probably aren’t.

Incorporating human nous into the process helps particularly when a potentially ambiguous word is searched. If Mahalo can’t help you, (I tried typing in the name of my obscure little home town in England), it provides links via other search engines that can provide you with some information.

Mahalo makes interesting browsing, with the directory having sections on News, Celebrity Gossip, Games, Sports, Gadgets, Shopping, Entertainment, Music and so on – it’s like having a really good magazine to read. There is even a Mahalo Daily Video which is heaps of fun, and packed with info.

So to the creators of Mahalo, I have simply this to say – thank you, Mahalo.

As well as movies, Hulu offers full-length episodes of NBC and FOX television programs, including shows from the Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen channels.

Hulu is currently in limited beta testing, during which fifteen to thirty second advertisements are presented where the normal three minute ad break would be.

In a manner similar to an old Martini ad, Hulu claim that their content is available “anywhere, anytime”, (actually, with Martini it was “anytime, any place, anywhere”), but the content on Hulu is currently only available to users in the United States, so not exactly the anywhere, anytime that Hulu over ambitiously claim.

However Hulu does claim that it is working on making its content accessible worldwide. Let’s hope so. What may be holding this back is the process of clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific region, which will take forever and a day.

If you want to sign up to beta test this new site, you can put in your email address on their home page, and they will add you to the private beta waiting list, and send you an invitation with username and password when they are ready for you. This doesn’t happen instantaneously – I signed up and still haven’t heard anything.

Do entrepreneurs and investors looking for something new get much chance to meet up with skilled developers? That chance probably does not arise as often as it should. Except that now something is being done to create that very opportunity, by the Open Coffee Club – and you don’t even have to drink coffee, juice will be just fine. The Open Coffee Club creates the opportunity for business people, developers and ideas people to meet up informally face-to-face, and this opportunity happens regularly at a specific place, in a number of major cities worldwide. You don’t have to attend every time – not at all, it’s just that the opportunity is there if you happen to feel like it, or if you have something specific you want to discuss.

The Open Coffee Club, which allows people to chat, network and grow, was founded by Saul Klein, who is also VP of Skype, amongst other significant internet work. In a blog post back in February 2007, Saul suggested the idea of the club as an attempt to establish an open and regular meeting place where entrepreneurs could meet with investors, and anyone else who cared to come along, with the setting being totally informal. The key point was establishing a regular place and a regular time, rather than who actually comes along. Saul suggested this as an idea that could be replicated globally, and a list could be drawn up of all the places where people could meet.

And so it came to pass that the first Open Coffee Club meet up was held in London on March 1st 2007 at Starbucks inside Espirit, Regent Street in London, the idea rapidly being taken up by others with Open Coffee meet ups being organised in places as diverse as Dublin, Barcelona, Zagreb, Sacramento and Capetown.

So if you fancy getting together and discussing business and ideas with some like minded people … coffee anyone?

Are you mad about the movies? If so, then you will be pleased to hear that there is now a social networking site especially for you. With the tagline “Stop watching bad movies”, Flixster is the social networking site for movie buffs, and within just one year has grown into one of the largest movie sites on the web, with over fifteen million registered users, and has outstripped other movie sites such as Fandango.

Like most social networking sites, users can create their own profiles and invite friends, but here they can also rate movies and actors, and write their own movie reviews for other users to read. The site also offers information about movies, and generates overall movie rankings on the basis of the 500 million movie ratings that have been provided by the users.

Users can chat to one another, look up movie showtimes, catch up with the latest movie news and gossip, view images of their favorite actors, and also see clips from popular movies and TV shows.

Just one worrying thing though, if you Google “Flixter” in conjunction with McAfee site advisor, the site is listed with a red cross next to the listing, and you are advised to use caution. Why? Well, it seems that Flixter has been cited as sending out too many “spammy emails”.

As for overall cosmetics, I have to admit that the home page is a bit busy, ad-filled and unappealing – your eye doesn’t quite know where to look.

So, my overall impression is: good idea, but could do with a bit more careful website design in terms of eye-appeal. Still, the proof of the pudding is Flixter’s success.

Well, talking of that great phenomenon known as open source, as I was last week, it now seems that Maxis is joining the fray, by releasing the SimCity source code.

SimCity is a simulation and city-building personal computer game, designed by Maxis founder Will Wright, and it was first released in 1989, which makes it pretty longstanding. It is said that to do well at the game, you just have to think like a capitalist. The code was officially released on January 10th 2008, so now anyone can port it, run it, and modify the game. The code has been released under the GNU General Public Library (GPL) license, brought about by the fact that there are plans afoot to add the game to the OLPC XO Laptop, which at the moment runs entirely open source software.

Naturally EA, the game company that owns the rights to SimCity wants to protect its trademark, and so there have been a few changes to the original source code, and all references to SimCity have been replaced with “Micropolis”, which is appropriate really, given that this was the original working title for the game.

The Micropolis source code, which was originally written in C, has been recast into C++ classes, and integrated into Python. The code has been considerably cleaned up and bullet-proofed.

So now that the code is available, what are aficionados going to do with it? It is interesting to see that yet more top code is going open source, and it will be intriguing to see where the current trend leads.

It is interesting to see that the open source movement is playing a prominent role in current innovations on the web.

In case you were wondering, open source is a philosophy about how software should be written, whereby the source code is available to the users. Additional meaning is added to the term by The Open Source Definition, written by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond, which states that one should not only be able to get the source code, but also have the right to use it. If other people don’t have the right to use it, then the license is considered to be a shared source license.

Anyone who wants to know more about the open source movement should take a look at Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was first presented as a talk in 1997, and is now available in book form, along with other essays. It is generally regarded as a manifesto for the open source movement.

Another prominent figure in the open source movement is Richard Stallman, who in 1983, launched the GNU Project, which created the free operating system Linux.

There are currently many examples of open source software that are improving the web no end. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is now one of the most popular browsers available, and is presenting a serious challenge to Internet Explorer. Open source is currently being embraced by the ubiquitous online social networking scene, where a set of common API’s for building social applications across the web are being established, such as Facebook’s open platform, and Google OpenSocial.

The open identity system OpenID 2.0 was launched in December, and an open ad network may be developed as an alternative to Google Adsense.

Overall, it looks as though the open source movement is here to stay, and has a lot to offer.