Google Uses Author Rank for In-Depth Articles
A question was posed to Google's Amit Singhal about Author Rank:
"On authorship, there is no author rank, but could that become a signal?" And Singhal responded, "Possibly it could."
Matt Cutts then responded on his own with this tweet:
Just a quick reminder, in-depth articles are high quality articles with rich content, featured prominently in the search results as they're meant to help search users to get a deeper look into a subject. We've continued to tout the importance of adding authorship markups to your content and feel strongly that they will only become more important.
...