I ran into this recently, when I needed to save a URL as a text clipping, not as a webloc file. (The situation is too bizarre to get into here, but suffice it to say it involved two user accounts on the same machine that needed to share data, and Lotus Notes.)
I knew that dragging the favicon from the URL bar to the Desktop results in a webloc. This is helpful, and expected. The favicon is the URL proxy, and should act like the object it represents. To get a *text* clipping, I figured I'd drag the *text* instead of the favicon. This should result in a text clipping, right? Nope. The Finder recognizes the http: prefix, and 'helpfully' converts it to a webloc file for you. Not what I wanted, or expected.
Mildly annoyed, I decided to break its helpfulness by prepending a space. Voila. Drag the resulting text from the URL box in Safari, and you get a text clipping you can drop anywhere.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070718094227504