It’s called Google Author Verification, and it’s part of Google’s “rich snippet” initiative. In this case, Google is verifying that the content it found as part of a crawl was indeed written by someone that has a Google Profile. There are links from the profile to the site, and from the site back, which “verifies” the authenticity of authorship, and therefore gets the author’s photo inserted next to the search listing.
There's not much in this for me besides recognition.