A Reason to Use rel="author" Links

Sites like Hacker News could easily add rel="author" link elements to posts— since every post and comment has a permalink— and users could add their site URL to their profile. This would create a nice semantic link between the user’s content on HN to their own personal site. With these author links in place, if you come across a great comment on HN you could use TipTheWeb to tip it some small amount of money, and that tip would be assigned to the author, and not news.ycombinator.com.

Until now, TipTheWeb.org has supported two types of sites: 1) independent websites (no integration required), where Tips go to the site publisher, and 2) popular publishing platforms like YouTube, Flickr, GitHub, etc. with custom integrations that we did with these sites. With our new multi-author support TipTheWeb now works well with a thrid type of site: ones which have content produced by multiple authors or contributors.

We would love to see sites with user-contributed content add this meta data to their pages, what do you think?