Google Places is Adding Upcoming Events via Rich Snippets

Reader Matt Feldman of Yelo.us has pointed out a new feature in Places where Google is now integrating venue events into their Places Pages. It allows an individual to add the event data to their personal Google calendar and to “invite friends using the ‘Add to calendar’ link that appears alongside the event”.

Google has confirmed that they are adding these events to venues “in a few major cities across the globe, including New York, San Francisco, London, Paris (and others)” and this “information is based on data from rich snippets markup“.

Wcities and Zevents events use the RDFa based Open Graph data structure. Other events appearing on the National Museum of the American Indian Places page from NYC.com are sructured with the event microformat (vcard) formatting. Although it does not seem to matter which format you are using, if you are operating a local site that includes events and you want your event information included in Places, you should be formatting the data with rich snippets.

The 2011 GSA Penrose Conference

Last week, at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, a group of 74 professors and students met for a Geological Society of America Penrose Conference to discussVisualizing the Possibilities for Geoscience Education and Research“.

Penrose_group.jpg

While the event was hosted at Google, and the Google folks certainly helped with logistics, the event was run by members of the geospatial community, for the purpose of discussing the role of Google Earth in higher education and research.

The week provided a wealth of ideas and information, such as Barb Tewksbury’s discussion of geologic map interpretation and John Bailey and Sean Askey’s presentation about generating tours from lines.

For a quick look at what the conference was like, Eugene Potapov shot this brief video:

To learn more about the topics discussed at the conference, your best resource for now are the blogs of Rich Treves and Meg Stewart, as they’ve both posted a lot of great information from the week. The official site should be updated soon with more detail about each presentation.

All in all, it sounds like it was a very educational week. Were any of you among the attendees? Leave a comment and let us know what you thought of the conference.