Highlight is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to capture quotes that substantiate your story from credible sources across the web. Select the pithiest 50 words that is the most newsworthy and, with one click embed that excerpt directly into your NowPublic story, thus getting it "from the horse's mouth" by crediting the person or site where you found it.

Highlight is a browser plug-in that, at present, is only available to Firefox users.Download Highlight for Firefox (compatible with Firefox 3.6) here.

(Should Firefox not display the Highlight button in its toolbar, you may need to add it via View->Toolbars->Customize)

Although Highlight is a powerful tool to quote from external sources and link back to them, it's no excuse to cut-and-paste a story together by stringing quotes in a row with little else to connect them. NowPublic encourages 80% original content to 20% Highlighted text at most - 3 highlight passages for every 600-word article. Entirely Highlighted posts will be unpublished or flagged for improvement.

If you are posting a story that was first published on your own blog (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr, etc), please be sure to use the Highlight tool to quote from the original post rather than just reposting it here. Google doesn't like duplicate content and neither do we, so reference it as a component of a new story here.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to using the Highlight tool to publish a story:

1. Once you’ve installed Highlight in Firefox, browse the web until you find the passage of text that you’d like to share (up to 50 words or 250 characters) and then select it using your mouse.
2. Click the NowPublic Highlight icon in your browser. Highlight will open in a box at the bottom of the page, and include the highlighted text in a [q url=” ”] format.
3. Add a headline if you haven't already started to post your story (using up to 65 characters) and add your own story text before and/or after the quoted text.
4. Select a Channel for your story, then type in relevant tags or select from the list of auto-tags to add them.
5. Click the Preview button to confirm the tags and preview your story.Check for related news stories in the right-hand column, click all that apply, and then click Preview Story.
6. If your story looks good to go, hit Publish and you’re done! If you want to make changes, you can save a draft or click the Edit Text tab. If you navigate away from your story or if something technically interrupts the publishing process from Highlight, your story will be automatically saved as a draft. Click your most recent Stories, Photos, and Videos on your member page to retrieve, edit, and publish auto-saved drafts.

For those using other browsers (or beta versions of Firefox), check out Highlight for non-Firefox users.