okay, so i have a got a long ass post coming about building a researcher browser with firefox - and it’s way overdue…but in the interim, i wanted to turn you on to a couple of very new and recently updated firefox extensions that i’ve been using and loving…these are really just time savers and utilities, but they’re extremely useful little timesavers if you’re dealing with a regular deluge of data during secondary research and get sick of clicking too many times, scraping together notes or cutting and pasting or copying and so on…

who is this person? this is a very new extension that pulls a highlighted name and runs a ton of quick queries on the name with a simple right-click, from the developer, “Highlight any name and request matches in LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Technorati, Yahoo Person Search, Google News, TailRank and more.”- but what would i like to see? the ability to add more engines and resources (duh)

down them all - sometimes when i hit a website and need to pull down 20 or more documents i start tearing out my hair (in the back, because i don’t want to lose any more in the front)…this very recently updated version lets you simply right-click and pull down everything that’s linked to from within the page, and then check/uncheck what you want to grab locally…there are several advanced features in configuration…

google’s send to phone extension - okay, so i shit on elgoog all of the time, but this a damned useful little tool for grabbing snippets (phone numbers, names, data points) and quickly sending to my phone - you highlight the text, then click the pic of the little phone in the upper right and select your carrier from the menu and away it goes (to your designated phone number) and voila, within roughly five seconds (my average), i get an sms with the snippet (and on my treo i can dial the number by just clicking it, which is nice)

wikalong sidebar wiki - this is just damned useful, sticks a little wiki into the sidebar during a firefox extension so that you can use the browser as a notetaking tool…an update for firefox 1.5 was just released on january 22nd so enjoy (from the creator, “embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet“) - btw, if you’re only using IE, there is actually a bookmarklet version too…and if you’re smart, you can use kwiki to share the wikalong notes and collaborate with others in a note taking environment specific to named websites (very, very cool collaborative utility here)

mystickies extension - okay, this is new and you can actually just go to the mystickies web site to set up your free account…very similar to the ancient idea (now ancient) proposes by third voice back in the day, but in this case, you don’t share your stickies…this is ideal for note taking during tabbed sessions or during the online research phase of a project that will eventually end (for security’s sake, use cryptic language and be sure to delete all stickies when you’re done)

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