The Greater Dayton IT Alliance is announcing web 3.0. Which is great and dandy- considering so many businesses in Dayton still aren’t web 2.0 or even web 1.0.

Dr. Sheth got a great write up on semantic web research in Sunday’s Dayton Daily News. Regular readers of Websitetology- may recall us pointing to an interesting search engine called Kartoo – http://blogosopher.com/?p=62 a social network mapping tool- which does some of the same things that Dr. Sheth’s semantic search research is focused on.

While I’m sure Dr. Sheth is a bright guy- the reality is- most people who are the leaders in the search field are already working for Google. They have the money, they have the technology- and – most importantly- they have the users already contributing the intelligence of the masses to refine the data.

But- here is what the GDITA says about the luncheon:

Come see Web 3.0, the future of the web. Dr. Amit Sheth, the the LexisNexis Eminent Scholar for Advanced Data Management and Analysis at Wright State University, DaytaOhio, will be presenting his research on advanced web technology. The presentation will look at future technology and include how local companies (big and small) can partner with the excellent research being done at Wright State University.

This event is for people interested in how they can incorporate advanced web technologies into their business offerings.

Dr. Sheth has held research and development, management and faculty positions at Honeywell, Unisys, Bellcore and the University of Georgia, where he founded the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSDIS). Dr. Sheth has founded two start ups and published more than 200 papers and articles and authored/edited four books. He has organized eight international meetings and holds two patents. He earned his Ph.D. in computer and information science at The Ohio State University.

One note: The GDITA site breaks Firefox on the Mac. Good web developers test their site in all relevant environments- Window, Mac, Linux – with IE, Firefox, Safari etc.

A client asked what happened to the undo button in WordPress 2.1- I thought it disapeared with the autosave- but with a little help from Google- I found an “Easter egg” function in WordPress.

WordPress 2.1 – More Editor Options » Solo Technology
Recently upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and pondering the WYSIWYG editor? Did you know there are more options there than what you first see? Me neither! But, thanks to “codeispoetry” in this support thread, I do now.

Go from this:

Basic toolbars

to this:

Advanced toolbar

PC users just hit alt-shift-v (Firefox) or alt-v (IE) to toggle it. Mac users– use cntrl-v (Firefox)

(Not seeing either of those? Visit Users → Your Profile and make sure that “Use the visual editor when writing” is checked. Still having problems? Visit the WordPress support forums.)

Pasting from word processors just became a whole lot easier. Two of the new buttons are “Paste as Plain Text” and “Paste from Word.” Nice for those who use such things. I like the custom character thing too. Now I can easily add ∞ whenever I need it…

The first thing we tell people is to get the Firefox browser to replace Microsoft Internet Explorer- it’s free, and it can do everything IE can do- plus a whole lot more. With Firefox 2.0 you get spell check in web forms- great for WordPress (pre 2.1- since 2.1 will have spell check)- and of course, RSS.

I just installed the Cooliris extension- and it’s way cool:

Cooliris Previews – Discover More…
Cooliris Previews is software that lets you view links without having to click or leave the page you are on. Previews makes it easy to navigate through multiple links quickly and easily.

It gives you a way to look at links to sites- without actually loading the site- but, it also does a whole bunch of other things- like look up words you don’t know in the free dictionary, wikipedia, or google. It works in the same way Google maps work- by pre-caching the links you may click on. I’m not sure how this will affect performance yet- but, for right now- I think Cooliris previews is the cat’s pajamas.