Google Closing Authorship Project?

Google Closing Authorship Project?
AJ Kohn, someone who focuses more on authorship and rich snippets than most SEOs I know, wrote a story named Authorship Is Dead, Long Live Authorship.

In that story, he describes why he thinks the classic Authorship Project is slowing being closed down. In short, he thinks that because classic authorship is opt in, it isn't easy to scale at the size Google needs. So Google uses other methods to extract authorship/rich snippet like data from sources to show the richer data in the search results.

So what he means is that what you see in the search results, the authorship display, is not dead. But maybe requiring webmasters to mark up their content and if they trust that markup, is dying.

by Barry Schwartz