Hacker News Reader

This is 100% right. A quick confirmation: "John Mu of Google has confirmed that you must have a headshot of yours in order to see your Google Plus avatar in Google’s rich snippet."

source: http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/social-media/log...

In fact I have mug shotted my posts before and if you switch the picture to a picture of something other than a face Google seems to penalize you.

Was an interesting experiment and one that I would like to take further.

Use a logo that passes machine pareidolia.

google now accepts a micro data format for logos - although I haven't really noticed them in SERPS yet http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-to-put-your-company-logo-on-go...