I don't see this as an indictment of Google Authorship at all; rather this is an example of a situation where user intention is misaligned with what a webmaster is showing. If I'm looking for content (particularly the originator of said content), having the author's name and face is exactly what I'm looking for. When you're searching for car parts or baby strollers or software, that same name/face is going to throw you off.

In what way is it risky? I can see it being too much work for some people/companies who do mediocre work to begin with. But I can't see what risks are inherent in establishing yourself (or your company) as a thought leader in your field.

See my point about the fact that for every inbound marketing campaign there is always an equal interruption marketing plan assigned to it. Want to write blogs every week? Great! But you need to spam it through distribution channels (twitter, facebbok, email campaigns, PPC, etc)

Long-term, I think inbound marketing is way less risky for one simple reason: We're living in an age of increasing choice and increasing transparency. As buysers/consumers, we're naturally going to lean increasingly towards companies that deliver a better product/experience -- not towards those that happen to place more frequent ads. Those that build their brand by delighting customers (all the way through the process from marketing to sales to service) will find that their investments create greater returns.

But, as I said, I'm biased (but that doesn't necessarily make me wrong).

Yes, but you may find it is more favourable (sometimes much more favourable) not to let yourself be pigeonholed as a certain kind of worker at all. Where possible, I'd recommend presenting your offer in terms of value it generates for your client, the way another business would rather than the way an employee would. Angle for them to be interested in results and not in any particular skills or technologies you use to achieve those results, and you change the way the discussion is framed.

However, this advice comes with the caveat that presenting things that way isn't always possible. Many clients really are looking for a certain skill set to fit in with an existing team, and you can make decent, if usually unspectacular, money with that kind of gig too. In that case, ideally you want to offer a credible rate but one toward the high end of the spectrum for your market, which brings us back to "yes".

That said: bottom line is that I should be charging a lot more than I am now. :)

Unfortunately, the result will be a lot of sites playing within the rules getting unfairly penalized, just like Panda and Penguin.

The problem with the app market is that you literally can't be your own bitch. Your entire business lies in the hands of either Apple or Google. And until HTML5 (or non-native alternatives) gain traction and press Apple/Google into changing their ways a little bit, what is the solution?

To be fair though, it can be difficult to diagnose even in the medical community, particularly given that it seems to be the default fallback for any parent wanting to medicate a child that may be going through a natural hyperactive phase.

On the other hand, I wasn't officially diagnosed until I was 20 so I spent 18+ years in the dark. Others I know went through similar (longer) periods of quiet self-diagnosis before they finally decided to go through what would be considered an appropriate test.

Exactly - I literally just had this discussion here yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475037). ADHD is incredibly tough (read: expensive) to diagnose properly, and almost impossible to self-diagnose with any appreciable degree of confidence.

My frustration comes from the fact that people first misdiagnose themselves or their kids, or diagnose themselves through inappropriate tests, which then leads people to conclude that ADHD doesn't really exist (see randallsquared's reply).

In other words, "our [cheap] classifier model is incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore the latent variable we're predicting must be imaginary", instead of "our [cheap] classifiers are incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore those diagnostic models are inadequate".

The current theory suggests that ADHD is caused by a mild disorder somewhere between when dopamine is released to communicate between the brain's neurons via synapses and when most of it is reuptaken back into the brain's dopamine bank and the rest is transported to other parts of the body. Some of this dopamine is converted in norepinephrine (adrenaline).

Explained in the simplest way, ADHD is caused either when not enough dopamine is let out, too much dopamine is reuptaken back into the storage and transported to become norepinephrine, and/or norepinephrine is reuptaken too fast.

This is why, theoretically, different ADHD medications are only effective on different types of ADHD patients.

And yeah, I share the difficulties in traditional academia with all of you. It can be almost impossibly hard to concentrate on getting a task done (irrespective of difficulty) if you don't have buy-in as far as what you're doing. School was one of those things for me, day jobs another. I drift constantly and find it hard not to think about the project I'm working on while at the day job.

On a related note, there should be an "ADDers Anonymous" for startup founders, bootstrappers etc (if there isn't already) for those with executive function type issues.

I've also started using a Chromebook (Samsung's ARM model, 'Daisy') away from my desk. CrOS's limits can actually be a bonus if you just want to get things done (SSH and a browser can be very productive). Kind of wish CrOS had a 'no-tabs, single page per window, all full-screen' mode to cut back the distractions even further.