– Currently Google (FAQ #3) only recognizes microformats (hCard, hReview) for Rich Snippets for Local Search. Thus, until Google expands support for microdata and RDFa formats, you should stick with hCard and hReview formats.

-You (#4) should only provide the actual phone number for the location and should not include call tracking numbers.

-If you (#6) provide precise geo-coordinates Google will use them but if not then address alone is okay.

-Structured data (#9)should not be used as an alternative to verifying your Places listing but in conjunction with it.

The big surprise for me though was FAQ #10:

How will Google treat businesses posting testimonials with review mark up on their own site? Will these be treated as a review by the Place Page?

Testimonials will be treated as business reviews on the Place Page.

This means that site owners will be able to contribute testimonials from their site to their Places page. The implications of this are profound in terms of the impact that these testimonials will have on review count. The impact that they will have on tone of the reviews, sentiment analysis and rank are yet to be seen but if they are handled exactly as current reviews are, this too will be profound. Webmasters will be busy tonight!

Here is the complete list of links to the questions answered in the FAQ:

1. Will annotating my site with structured markup negatively or positively impact my ranking in search results?
2. Will Rich Snippets for Local Search be recognized for non-English sites?
3. Does it matter if I use microdata, microformats, or RDFa to mark up my site or do Google’s crawlers treat them equally?
4. Does it matter whether I include multiple telephone types?
5. Should the <url> point to my home page or to the location specific page?
6. Do I need to specify the <geo> lat long or is it okay to only use <adr>?
7. What additional types of structured data does Google plan to recognize in the future?
8. If I annotate my site with structured markup, where may results appear?
9. Should business owners be using structured markup instead of Google Places?
10. How will Google treat businesses posting testimonials with review mark up on their own site? Will these be treated as a review by the Place Page?
11. Will Rich Snippets for Local Search be as trusted as Google Places data?
12. If I annotate my site with structured markup, how fast may results appear on the Place Page?
13. What is the optimal way of using structured markup. Should you have a separate “Reviews” page or should you incorporate them within the body of the site?

When people first meet Linux Kernel SCSI subsystem maintainer James Bottomley, one question that often comes up is, “Why the bow tie?” Jeremy Allison, Samba co-founder and Google Open Source Programs Office team member, spent time with James at LinuxCon last month and uncovered the answer. After that, Jeremy gets the backstory on the inspiration behind James’ LinuxCon talk about how to convince management to embrace open source (4:58). James also talked about how he became the SCSI subsystem maintainer (1:54) and how he started working on open source (6:47).

Thanks to Sergio Victorino for operating the camera.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

Building on the three previous milestones, we’re happy to announce the first release candidate (RC1) of GWT 2.1. While we’re still focused on the overall theme of making it easier to build cloud portable business apps via some help from our friends at VMware and Spring, there are more than a few aspects that make this milestone a RC.

First we’ve rounded out the list of components and features that will ship with GWT 2.1. One of these components is a new Editor framework that allows you to bind your DTOs to a customizable UI which handles all of necessary grunt work of validating and syncing change sets. Another is the availability of the SafeHTML component and its integration within the cell-based widgets. After all, we’ve optimized these new widgets by injecting HTML, we better do it in a secure manner.

Along with the new components and features, we’ve solidified the Activities/Places, RequestFactory, Editor framework, and Cell-based widget APIs. So, if you’re looking to start a project with GWT 2.1, you can feel confident that your team won’t have to refactor code because we’ve switched out interfaces between now and the final release.

Also, if you’re looking to get started with GWT 2.1 we have an initial draft of the new Developer Guides. These can be found at the links below (the Editor framework Developer Guide is coming soon).

• Activities/Places
• RequestFactory

• Cell-based widgets

As with previous milestones, there will be an associated Spring Roo RC1 and SpringSource Tool Suite RC1, that will be available in the next few days. Keep your eye on the SpringSource blog, as Christian and Ben are active contributors.

GWT 2.1 RC is available on our Google Code download site and as
version 2.1-SNAPSHOT in the Google
Maven Snapshot Repository. We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this release, and our GWT Developer Forum would be the best place to post this information.