"PeopleRank" he's suggesting is good for jut two very special kinds of individuals.<p>First group is public figures and marketing people. Visibility and being relevant means everything to them. But even these folks often maintain dual personality life i.e. public/true versions of themselves. Some smarter programming contractors also fall into this category, although they prefer to call themselves "consultants" presumably because it lacks an unwanted association with plumbers, roofers and other contract workers of "lesser glamour".<p>The second group is pretty much "first group wannabes", i.e. highly social individuals crying for more attention. Most blogging programmers fall into this category, i.e. folks who (instead of actually coding) can spend an evening writing a post on something as pointless/dumb as "RDBMS is obsolete" prettying it up with irrelevant photos of random objects. No, they aren't any more "experts in AJAX" than folks who don't blog, they just want attention.<p>But most of us don't belong to either of these two groups. When I attended the startup school last year I met about 50 different HN folks, and most of them have never posted anything here, let alone using their real name. "PeopleRank" would only anger them, I suppose.
I think he brings up a good point, but I have serious doubts about google using it because of privacy issues.<p>What he suggests is that there is a ranking for each person in the world, and the content he creates will be ranked higher in the world. Merely tracking the same author could either be an invasion of privacy -- tracking the ip and/or taking a peek at the person's cookie, or ridiculously hard -- analyzing usernames, vocabulary, tone of voice, etc.<p>He mentioned doing something special with openid, but it would need widespread adoption before this could be done.