In honor of the weekend I figured I’d take the liberty of trying out a few new blogging tools which may or may not make your life easier.

First on deck we’ve got Zemanta, available as a WordPress plugin or, for those not using WordPress or unable to install plugins, it’s also available as an extension for Firefox. Zemanta will automatically search for contextualy related articles, links, images, and videos avaialbe under Creative Commons licences or fair use, or lets you search for an image of whatever you want, say a cat. Notice the fancy popup attributions?

I thought I saw a puddy cat....
Image by law_keven via Flickr

Zemanta takes a lot of the headache out of finding and attributing content and images for your blog and suggests other blogs that have written about similar content to make researching faster.

I’ve also been using Prism by Mozilla Labs. I’ve been using it to run Web2.0 sites like Google Reader and my WordPress control panel. Prism gives you a clean, fast, stand alone environment to run them the same way you would run any desktop application. Prism makes it easy to keep web applications open that you use all the time such as your RSS reader or Hootsuite.

Finally I’d like to make a quick mention to Incollector, a free program I use to keep track of notes, ideas, and references with a searchable and tagable database.

What programs do you use to make your daily life easier?