Authorship markup - how and why?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Stockbridge Truslow: For several clients and myself, yep. How - the same old way as always - schema markup for the particular article in question.
  
  Why? For myself on my blog, I`m building my own brand as much as the web site itself. For clients, if they have someone who is an expert and the "face" of the company, the author name is an entity like any other which has various elements that are framed about it. I don`t need a link from their scholarly articles, white papers, or patents, for example, in order for Google to understand that the person behind those is also the person behind a particular post.
  
  Some will likely argue the value of this for various reasons. I, on the other hand, have my own reasons for believing it`s valuable. In the end though - it doesn`t really matter. It takes me 10 minutes to set it up on the web site and then once it`s done, it just happens automatically anyway - so even if it does nothing, it costs nothing. (It DOES do something, though - and site visitors relate better to people than corporations so giving the company a "face" benefits there, too).
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Stockbridge but without a G+ page to link to isn`t a name only (that`s what you`re using) a bit of an ambiguous entity?
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  Stockbridge Truslow: Not really because your "sameAs" (which is where you`d attach your G+ ID) can contain Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia or any other page(s) which represent the person. Here are some of the usual suspects in the SEO field...
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  Michael Martinez: Well, Google`s Authorship program is dead but a few years back I began linking to my personal domain from Websites where I publish under my own name. This is my way of verifying myself to the Internet. My personal site confirms the accounts are mine by linking back to the most important social media profiles and Websites. I don`t really care if the search engines or social media services acknowledge me as "an entity" but I`m pretty well-known and people who want to find me seem to have no problem doing so.
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Curious to know how well Google can piece together the clues pointing towards an assumed entity without being semantically linked via some markup ar taxonomy (?)
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  Michael Martinez: Mathias Pantalonias Well, they give me a few Knowledge Boxes in obscure queries. Microsoft is more generous. "Michael Martinez" is a very common name (excluding middle names) and I share it with a couple of athletes, some authors, professors, etc. In 2010 I made an effort to promote sites for them in Google`s results because I had unwittingly captured 6 of the top 10 positions for our shared name space. That was embarrassing. Most people are interested in the baseball player. So I gave him and others some space. Even so, without all the special markup, Google and Bing figure out who we are.
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Nice to see that Bing actually gives you the ability to verify many multiple social profiles (uhm including MySpace?...)
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  Michael Martinez: Mathias Pantalonias I don`t mean Google and Bing are verifying anything. They`re just creating Knowledge Boxes based on what they find on the Web without any special markup. The "verification" simply consists of me interlinking between my social profiles and my name-branded Website. That`s just so I can send curious people to the right places. I`ve been impersonated on social media more than once.