My friend Kemar turned me on to this list of jQuery plugins maintained by Marc Grabanski self-proclaimed "Jack of all trades in Web development." He took it upon himself to go through the jQuery plugins repository, and he picked out what he felt was noteworthy or most useful in his eyes. It’s a pretty good list and he’s got plenty of other stuff going on over on his custom-built blog, including this old post on how he built it, be sure to check it out.