The microformats wiki explains rel=”author” as (emphasize mine)
rel="author"is for relating an article or post to a page or site representing its author, typically to give them credit for their work (or portions of it, like books, articles, blog posts etc).…
The
rel="author"attribute indicates that the destination of the link represents the author of the current page (or post).
And the rel=”me” is
XFN 1.1 introduced the “me” rel value which is used to indicate profile equivalence and for identity-consolidation.
rel="me"is used on hyperlinks from one page about a person to other pages about that same person.…
Thus establishing a bi-directional rel-me link and confirming that the two URLs represent the same person.
At first read the definitions are simple and understandable, the problems arise while trying to implement them due to the subjective and fluid nature of the terms “profile” and “represent“.
What is a profile, and more importantly what is my profile? Is it just some web page that its title contains the word “profile” and my name, and should it be officially sanctioned as a profile by a big company like google or facebook or can I make my own? What information makes a page a profile? Can someone else write my profile, is the wikipedia page about me a valid profile to use? Can my profile be generated automatically, can a search page after my name in google serve as my profile?
And why do I need to link my profiles, isn’t it more logical to simply have only one profile if they can be linked? People have more then one profile to show separate sides of their personality to different audiences, for example professional and personal profiles, and linking them will run contrary to the thought process resulting in the creation of two distinct profiles.
Representation is even harder to understand. My blog represents me, but there is no one page on it that does it by itself. Yes I wrote an “about me” page but this is usually the first page being written and one that is almost never updated to reflect any changes. What represent better a practicing book writer, his blog or his official page at his publishers site? Should it be a representation that I simply endorse or does it have to be written by me.
If you have only one site or you participate in only one social network it is probably not too hard to figure out these relationships, but once you have more then one site and participate in more then one network, deciding what is your main profile and organizing the relationships is something you need to put some work into it, and what do you get in return for your work? nothing. Google and the rest of the social search companies gets some more data to build their social graph, from which they can make money, and you at best get a small icon of yours next to an excerpt of what you wrote in a page where they place ads from which they make money.
Right now the way I see it the main problem with rel=”author” and rel=”me” is convincing people to care about setting them in a way which is meaningful and consistent. For now google sells its authorship requirements under the implicit promise of SEO improvements, but what if the improvements will not be delivered and what about people who care nothing about SEO?
Right now techcrunch uses rel=”me” to point to its G+ profile (line 1 below), and if techcruch can’t (or don’t want to) handle this correctly how many sites owners will?
<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/techcrunch"/> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="TechCrunch RSS Feed" href="http://feedproxy.google.com/TechCrunch" /> <link rel="pingback" href="http://techcrunch.com/xmlrpc.php" /> <link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://s2.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch2/images/favicon.ico?m=1357660109g" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://s2.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch2/images/favicon.ico?m=1357660109g" /> <link rel="stylesheet" id="style-css" href="http://s2.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch2/style.css?m=1357603790g" type="text/css" media="all" /> <link href="https://plus.google.com/103037366582313115962/" rel="publisher" />
Which brings us to think of fake profiles and false attribution, but this article is Tl;Dr as it is now and no point in making it longer.