I just stumbled upon this by accident.
Hyperwords 3.6 allows you to highlight a word in a (Firefox) browser/tab and a menu automatically pops up. This menu gives you tons of choices as to what to do with the highlighted text, including a multitude of searches (google, social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace) and a translation tool. A Flickr or YouTube search will bring up a small image preview. You can send the selected text to your email application or blog. There is a currency converter and some other neat features like viewing the Google Cache or checking the site’s traffic or ranking. Hyperwords is also customizable. I’ve already made a tweak: when you highlight anything the Hyperwords gizmo will pop up- which can be a pain when you intend to just paste something into another application- so I changed my settings to make Hyperwords pop up after highlighting and hitting F2).
There was a review from Jadawin50 that said that the extension messed with her copy and paste functionality when working from Microsoft Word and pasting into FF page or when copy and pasting from one FF tab to another tab. I just checked this out and my machine didn’t have a problem (my work computer runs XP, Office 2007, FF2.0). I’ll check it at home too, where I’m running Office 2003.
Hyperwords is pretty handy for any information professional or avid web2.0 junkie. It puts a lot of tools in one handy box.
See a demo on YouTube of Hyperwords here. Get the Firefox extension here. Don’t have Firefox? Do yourself a favor and make the switch.
For more great FF add-ons for 2.0 librarians (and other info gurus) see Michael Sauer’s post.
Playing in Puddles 