Newspaper writers - columnists and reporters - could benefit from a Google innovation known as "authorship markup". It's a way of connecting authors with their content on the web.
It will help people find content from favourite authors in search results, and enable websites to link within their site from content to author pages.
For example, says the official Google blog in announcing the experiment, if an author at the New York Times has written dozens of articles, using its new markup, the webmaster can connect the articles with a New York Times author page.
It continues: "An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author's bio, photo, articles and other links."
According to Google, pre-launch trials showed that it worked well with sites that included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and CNET.
Source: Google blog Hat tip: journalism.co.uk
