July 2010 – x-pose.org

Is it Time for a New Google Syntax for Comments?

The average blog post is fairly easy to index and crawl for Google. However, what happens when a single page has several hundred comments? How does Google decide what’s important to include in a search query and what to ignore? Heck, in some cases the comments on a Reddit post are more important than the actual summary of the article submission itself.

A lot of websites have been adding a voting aspect to comments for some time now. However, no search engine (as far as I know), looked into taking these votes into account when crawling. I propose a new type of “rich snippet” syntax for Google, Comment Syntax.

What if websites included the syntax so Google could not only clearly identify comments, but quickly pick the most popular/useful comments to showcase in certain search queries. This could be applied to sites such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, Stackoverflow, and just about any WordPress blog.

What do you guys think? Would this be helpful?

If iPhone4 has a problem with it’s antenna, why aren’t there more customer calls about it?

You heard about Apple’s press conference from Friday about reception and antenna issues. Steve said much about nothing and tried to pass the blame around to whomever he could. However, I want to concentrate on one particular quote that is surprising at first glance:

Only 0.55 percent of iPhone 4-related calls received by Apple Care have been related to the antenna or reception problems, Jobs said. The return rate, meanwhile, is at 1.7 percent, lower than the 6 percent rate for the iPhone 3GS, Jobs said.

.55 percent having to do with antenna or reception problems sounds remarkably low, so how can we account for that? Here are two possible explanations:

Most of the iPhone user base does not call customer service for issues. Instead, they are smart enough to turn to tech blogs such as Engadget or TechCrunch. I’d say the majority of it’s users either heard from their friend or read it online themselves that there was an obvious issue and waited for Apple’s response.
It’s no secret that at&t has a horrible network. Users who experienced dropped calls probably just chalked it up to at&t being a horrible network rather than their iPhone4 being the reason. Who can blame them? I would have probably assumed that myself had I not been reading tech blogs.

This is just my opinion, I have no real evidence to back any of this up. What I can tell you is that after the Apple conference, Jobs has never looked more disconnected and arrogant as he did on Friday.