One of the blogs I read regularly - prblogger - recently reached its second birthday. To mark the occasion, prblogger’s Stephen Davies posted a recap of some of his favourite posts from the past two years. This kind of recap can be really useful for new readers and for regular readers like me too – it’s a great way of getting people to dip into the archives.

My favourite discovery is Stephen’s post on Firefox extensions from February 2006. Firefox is my preferred web browser, although I spend plenty of time checking sites in Internet Explorer as well. I’m already using the Google Toolbar and del.icio.us links extensions for Firefox, but most of the others that Stephen mentions are new to me.

I’ll definitely be testing out the Who is this person? add-on which allows you to highlight any name on a webpage and see matching information from LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google News, Technorati and other sites, as well as Screengrab which allows you to save whole webpages as images. If these live up to expectations then they’ll be incredibly useful and time-saving devices for me.

Take a look at the Firefox Add-ons website for a full list of extensions for the browser, or check out Stephen’s list of extensions for a quick overview of some of the most useful add-ons.

Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion has conducted an interesting study on major brands and Wikipedia. The study found that on average, Wikipedia articles appear as result number 11 in Google searches on the top 100 brands in the United States (by advertising spend) - just outside of the first page of results. Many of the brands had Wikipedia articles on the first page - Chevrolet and McDonald’’s, for example, both returned a Wikipedia article at number 4.

Steve’s conclusion is that companies need to ensure they keep an eye on what Wikipedia says about their company / brand. He also makes the important point that it should strictly be a case of ‘look but don’t touch’ - the neutral stance that Wikipedia aims for makes it inappropriate and inadvisable for companies to manipulate entries. Jeff Jarvis echoes this point on his blog.