Suddenly Google+ looks increasingly more important for those who create content regularly online - reminds me of the old Technorati (which I think is still around but not as popular) and they used to provide ""trust"" type rankings to blogs in different areas.
When I was gadget blogging -- a link to our site from a highly trusted blog (in our industry) was a big boost to our trust (Technorati score).
Interesting that it appears that authorship may soon be destined for the same (probably much more accurate) ranking from Google.
Potentially this begins to really clear up the spam problem because if Google now renders authority to the author they can slowly begin to cut out scraper sites and those copy/paste web pages that quickly appear online and sometimes gather very high search rankings in Google.