Now, new on the scene is Zemanta, currently available as a Firefox plugin. I’ve installed it and am giving it it’s first run and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s still in heavy development but is very impressive, here are a few of things they are doing better than Yahoo! shortcuts:

• Zemanta puts everything on the Write Post screen, With Yahoo! you had to jump to a new page, make your additions and then jump back and fix anything the plugin made a mess of.
• Link suggestions are single click and go where you would naturally want. Right now you can generally pick between the site’s home page or a Wikipedia entry, more options are on the way.
• Tag suggestions! Zemanta suggests tags for your post from your content and semantic search for related keywords you may not have written about.
• Related Article Suggestions from around the web (see below). You may not like this if you hate the idea of sending a reader to another site, but it increases the benefit to your reader and that’s important for return visitors.

There are a few things that I would like to see added, or if they exist make it easier to find them:

• A Wordpress plugin. It’s not hard to install Zemanta, but if it were a Wordpress plugin I could use it on any computer and any browser. Then it would have access to suggest from my existing categories and make use of other internal Wordpress functionality.
• Gallery Scroll for more pictures, everything I see now is Firefox and Wordpress none of which I want to use so let me scroll for more than just the 9 available.
• Internal links – give me a section of related links that are only from my site
• OPTIONS! Give me options! What if I don’t want suggested articles with adult content and want all my inserted links to be no follow? Even changing the color scheme or the ability to turn off some of he features would be nice.

Overall, I’m impressed. I’m not real sure about the Zemified button down there, but I’ll certainly leave it up for this post!

The one I am featuring today is Copy Plain Text. It is very simple but very good. It does just what it says it gives you the ability to highlight any text on a web page and copy it as plain old text. For anyone that does research or writing from the web knows that when you copy from a site you often get rich text instead of plain text. I often kept a Notepad window open and copied to Notepad first and then copied again from Notepad to my Word doc. Otherwise when pasting into Word or whatever office app you use you would end up with poorly formatted rich text. The days of double copy and paste are over. Simply install this Firefox extension and your right click menu will now have an option that says “Copy Plain Text.” This is a small extension that you may just find you can not live without. The author’s description is as follows…

Have you ever copied text from a website and pasted it into an email program, such as Thunderbird, but been frustrated that the text formatting (bold, italic, font, etc.) were copied with it? This extension copies the text without all the formatting.

Try it out and let me know what you think. Do you have any Firefox extensions you can’t live without?