The Rise of Online Authorship
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... to be an online author. It was a time when brilliant individuals could publish content at will. It was a time when complete idiots could publish content at will. It was the time when information could not be shut up. It was a time when the voices of the bland self promoters nearly drowned out other voices. This is that time ... sort of.
Whether you are a content publisher of a blog, a podcast, your own IPTV channel or something else, the barrier of entry to get your content onto large platforms of consumption is virtually nonexistent. There has never been a better time to be a content author, in the sense that the role of the publisher has been lessened.
Not only is the barrier of entry removed, but search engines (like Google) with the new rel="author" tag, want to give credit to certain authors! The author tag markup is simply a way that bloggers or online article writers of any sort can tag posts as written by them and authenticate this through their Google+ account. The advantages for Google here are manifold. In a nutshell, their business model is based around knowing everything they can about you and I. Without getting into that here, there are advantages to the content creator in using this new feature.
Here are some of the reasons a content creator might utilize the authorship tag:
- The markup as it appears in search results will get higher click through rates for your content.
- Instead of shares, likes, retweets, and traffic only counting toward a specific URL or domain on which your content is posted, now those social affirmations will be associated with you.
- Content creators now have a bucket with which to carry around their own "AuthorRank" or credibility, rather than that being tied up in a domain like CNN.com. So, a contributor on CNN.com can carry with them credibility to other websites they contribute to without traditional hyperlinks. You, individually become a medium of influence.
Today, the author markup works for written content online. In the near future, I foresee this implemented into YouTube channels. Soon thereafter, other Google products, like, perhaps Google Play App publication, all online video publishing through various platforms and more.
While Facebook has had much abuzz about it's future, still, people come back to search to find content. While Google+ may be a ghost town now, if Google does things well, I foresee this accreditation of individual influence within search to be the best way I have seen so far to filter the web. The concerns with your online credibility being within Google's grasp to turn on and off, their ability to filter what you see and do not see, and a myriad of other concerns are larger and legitimate issues. However, from a content creator standpoint, leveraging the use of "AuthorRank" is a great way to rise above the Internet noise of faceless content.
This post is using the authorship markup by linking my name to a biography page on this domain, then linking that domain to my Google+ account.
For a complete list of how to set this up yourself, you can go to the Google page about the markup.
