The Garmin’s GTU 10 tracking unit

When Garmin announced their GTU 10 tracking unit earlier this year, everyone was quick to think of the scenarios in their busy lives that could be made easier, safer or more secure through the use of this versatile new product.

Whether you’re a parent keeping an eye on your young kids after school, a pet owner watching after your curious cat or canine or a faithful friend or family member supporting your loved ones’ favorite endurance events, the small and simple GTU 10 can come in handy with its location tracking and geofence alerts. How easy is GTU to use? Just watch these introductory videos, and then share your thoughts on how you’d answer: “How do you GTU?”

The Snippets Gone From Google Results

Sometime over this past weekend Google stopped showing any review snippet with either Blended or the Branded One Box Results in the main search results view for many results. It appears that snippets are still visible in restaurants, hotels and possibly other heavily reviewed areas

New view (from 6/27):
 

 


 
View from last week (taken 6/23)
 

Review snippets have also been removed from most typical blended results (again with the exception of restaurants/hotels). This change seems consistent with the recent change to remove the images from the Blended results that occurred earlier in the month and effectively moves more information above the fold. Review snippets were first seen in the Google Blended results tests that ran last summer and were a regular part of the results since the Blended results were formally released in late October of last year. For me, they were a salient feature that dramatically changed the role of reviews in reputation management bringing a “typical review” front and center for all to see. The review snippets were derived via algo and were intended to provide a representative flavor of the review corpus. As in my example above, the snippets were not always accurate.  While I don’t think that was a reason in their demise, I am sure some businesses will be grateful they are gone.

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.