A cool "app"
I think one of the reasons for the continuing popularity of Powerpoint over web-based apps for presentations is the ease with which Powerpoint does charts and diagrams. Well, have I got a solution for you! Gliffy is one of those great little free Web 2.0 apps that allows you to do cool stuff online and share it with other people: in this case make diagrams. I thought of it immediately for teaching (you know, when you want to do those complicated medieval hierarchy diagrams, or Oedipus' family tree, or whatever...), but they have so many helpful little built in templates, like furniture for doing room layouts, and network symbols and so on, that I started thinking of all kinds of things I could do with it myself. Not to mention that big plan to get the family tree in some kind of order...