Authonomy as a Model for Tomorrow's Publishing Contracts?

I read in Jane Friedman's blog There are no Rules (at Writer's Digest) that HarperCollins has signed three authors to contracts who submitted their work on the HarperCollins site Authonomy. One of these authors had already self-published, and one used Authonomy to get an agent, but one was simply highly rated by the Authonomy community.

This is a fascinating development suggesting that social networking on the web has the power to transform traditional publishing. Recall that Epstein's Book Business was written before Amazon had started to make money, and in the book Epstein can't figure out how Amazon would ever turn a profit. It retrospect, his pessimism seems wildly off the mark. But who could have predicted how the social networking tools of Amazon (such as user ratings) and the use of Google-like algorithms to recommend books for individuals based on their browsing and purchasing history, would have such an impact? Authonomy seems to be relying on the same sort of thing: submitted works get bumped up in the ratings, and a kind of sorting takes place by the small crowd of users. Now, will this be successful as a model? Who can tell? If it makes more people partcipate in Authonomy, that is likely to be good, because a larger, more diverse group will resemble more closely the total reading public.