Contextly is proud to announce our first publicly available tool – Standout Stories by Contextly.

The tool allows sites that are indexed by Google News to tell the search engine about the site’s best stories. It also lets you get karma by giving praise to other sites when you reblog or write about their content.

Google’s idea is that it will know better what stories to feature if sites give it some metadata about which of the site’s stories are really good. And though Google doesn’t come out and say it, it seems that there’s some good karma (read SEO bonus) in giving a link to other sites’ great stories.

Google suggests you only label 7 of your own stories a week “Standout Stories,” so the plug-in counts for you.

But you are free to give as many shout-outs, plaudits and compliments to other people’s stories as you like, so we built that into the Visual editor bar as its own button.

Give Standout Stories a try and let us know if how much you think the tag helps in Google News. Hard data would be very interesting to see if you gather it. Also if you have any feedback about the plugin, please let us know!