Yesterday, in our weekly staff meeting, Bailey Gardiner’s COO, Indra Gardiner, introduced us to something Firefox, and only Firefox, is currently doing. They have added an add-ons feature (which can be found in the Tools section). There are over 5,000 of them that allow you to customize Firefox to meet your needs. And the best part is, it’s free!

Image via Wikipedia

I am sure by now you are wondering, ok so what exactly can I do with these Firefox add-ons?
Well, the possibilities are endless.

One of the add-ons that was introduced to us by Indra is called Ad Blocker. We all are quite familiar with all the ads we are served on website after website. Now, we have the control on what sites, if any, that we want to see banner ads on. Pretty cool, but also pretty scary for advertisers, like our marketing agency in San Diego, because now it makes it just that much more difficult to reach people online.

Another cool add-on is Zemanta.

Image via CrunchBase

Zemanta allows you to “add enrichment to your blog posts and emails through tags, links, photos and related articles, all in real time.” This really helps you save time while blogging. As I am writing this post, Zemanta is automatically searching for images that are relevant to what I am writing about. Then I can just drag them right into my post. This saves me the hassle of having to search for images or think about what image I should put in my post.

I did a little test with this add-on to see how well it really worked with providing you actual images that were specific to what you were writing about, and for the most part, it works really well. Even when I typed in “Oregon Ducks” to this post, Zemanta brought up the Oregon “O” (see bottom row in the middle on the image above). My only complaints with this add-on are:

1. It can be a little touchy when trying to place the image into the post

2. All the images have to say where they are provided from

It has only been a day since I’ve been introduced to this feature, so I still have lots of exploring to do on all the other add-ons they offer. I am curious to see if there is an add-on where I can select all my favorite sports teams and then only see their scores, highlights, news releases, etc… Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, I’ll just have to search for it.