[Wayne]

Well Instead of trying to convert ‘Notes’ into something else (as it seems really painful to remove RTE from it), why don’t you make a new permanent text only field called ‘Keywords’ or ‘Tags’ to your Connections plug-in. This would improve site search results.

Also whenever Connections displays a single listing it can include the Keywords/Tags in the page meta-data ‘Keywords’. This would greatly improve search results for the search engines.