I disagree. You are blurring 2 concepts here, and are throwing out the baby with the bath water. Decouple the "social network" junk of Google+ from the concept of validated authorship.
Authorship is valuable. Show me everything that Jane Example wrote. Yes, on her personal blog, but also in her column for Wired. And didn't she used to write for the WSJ, or the Guardian? Those too.
Cite systems like this have existed in academia for over a decade. Google's entire existence, as well as PageRank, grew from Larry and Sergey's Backrub project at Stanford which, you guessed it, ranked academic papers and authors based on which other papers/authors cited them, and in turn how those papers/authors ranked.
Authorship at the index/search level is more powerful and comprehensive that other approaches. Yes, Jane could keep a website with links to all her articles. How up-to-date is that? What happens when the WSJ redesigns and those links 404, even though her content still exists, just in a new location? The model shouldn't be "I am Jane, and I wrote this thing that's located over there." Authorship needs to be coupled to the content.
I have not liked Google+ at all. But is a step backward to abandon the concept of authorship entirely.
I'm taking specifically about linking authorship and Google+ and including photos in search results with names. Google can still make it possible to search by author without needing up search results.
Authorship is valuable. Show me everything that Jane Example wrote. Yes, on her personal blog, but also in her column for Wired. And didn't she used to write for the WSJ, or the Guardian? Those too.
Cite systems like this have existed in academia for over a decade. Google's entire existence, as well as PageRank, grew from Larry and Sergey's Backrub project at Stanford which, you guessed it, ranked academic papers and authors based on which other papers/authors cited them, and in turn how those papers/authors ranked.
Authorship at the index/search level is more powerful and comprehensive that other approaches. Yes, Jane could keep a website with links to all her articles. How up-to-date is that? What happens when the WSJ redesigns and those links 404, even though her content still exists, just in a new location? The model shouldn't be "I am Jane, and I wrote this thing that's located over there." Authorship needs to be coupled to the content.
I have not liked Google+ at all. But is a step backward to abandon the concept of authorship entirely.