Read Google News and Earn News Badges

The award for strangest move by a mega-company this week has to go to Google for its News Badge program. By reading more, you will receive badges from Google indicating your level of news readership. All that was not fully explained is the reasoning behind this new program. Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

I read Google News every day. When I opened the page up yesterday, I looked at it, thought, "Achievements? For reading the news?" and clicked "Permanently disable all news badges."

Then I read the news.

Which is what I was there for.

MajorDomo said:

The award for strangest move by a mega-company this week has to go to Google for its News Badge program. By reading more, you will receive badges from Google indicating your level of news readership. All that was not fully explained is the reasoning behind this new program. Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

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I am going to look at this as Google trying to get the "information overloaded yet somehow completely clueless to the going on in the world" generation a carrot. They are trying to, as a "PSA," entice more people to read the news and be more informed. Using this badge "reward" system will resonate with some of the younger groups, which will also help mold future minds. For example, read TMZ, get a -2 pts to your badge total. Read something about current affairs, such as The Times and get a +2...Don't know, this sounds like a win/win to me...

Great.. so a CIA front company gets to "reward" people for reading their handpicked propaganda.

news is so fucking negative and that is why i dont absorb in, i figure if its important someone will tell me

Achievements for reading the news. Achievement whores should love this.

Maybe [H] should institute achievements for clicking ad links.
Seriously, what could it hurt?

Sadly this will probably be a popular idea...

I still use RSS feeds as my primary method of gathering information related to my interests. It boggles my mind that sharing items, liking items, and making comments on items still does not push to Google+.

While the ability to +1 news can be nice to share content with friends quickly through Google+, I'm not sure we need a badge system to level up our ability to click-through content.

Call me crazy, but I feel that it's only a matter of years before achievements spread to our everyday lives and start appearing on our resumes... The companies that implement these systems need to exercise extreme caution in making sure that the achievements are accurate reflectors of real-world merit.

For instance, these news achievements are only triggered because the page was loaded, not because the person actually read the entire article. Eventually I'm sure they could confirm readership by tracking eye movements via webcam, but even then there would be ways to cheat the system. It won't be long now before some egotist writes a script that loads all the political articles for him so that everybody else will think he's savvy when they see his 5-star readership achievement. Harmless and pathetic now, but imagine the havoc this sort of cheating could cause when politicians use achievements to win elections and co-workers use achievements to become your next boss!

we don't need badges, we need money

imagine if you replace every time they say the word "you" or "your" in that ad, with the word "we" and "us".

"with google news badges, we can learn about your reading habits, create a more personalized experience...", and better aim our ad-serving rifles at you, enabling us to extract higher profits.

all this is serving to do is to give people an incentive to sit there and click a bunch of articles to "be the best" and get the most badges. more badges = more click-thrus and referal stats for google, = more profit.