Othar Hansson, Software Engineer at Google.com writes:

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Today we're beginning to support authorship markup -- a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our help center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web.

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We all have to prioritize our time but would something like this have value?    The NY Times is a different beast because they are syndicated and we don't have that level of reach but it is worth discussing.  We can also see how much traction the Google +1 social thing has.   If no one uses social media to link to articles, it is unlikely authorship markup and its more narrow use would be valuable.  Let me know what you think.