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Google Launches News Badges
theodp writes "Does it make you sad that you're too grown up to earn Scouting Merit Badges? Well, thanks to the PhDs at Google, you can now start earning Google News badges as you read articles about your favorite topics. The more you read, the higher rank you'll attain; Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate. They say, 'Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are.'"
I refuse to give up one of the few pieces of data about me that Google allows me to control... for a few pixels.
Madam what you are is clear, we are merely haggling over price.
Digital Citizen
just going in on a specific genre doesn't make you well read either. reading exclusively scifi and fantasy just makes you a dork idiot, too, though if you have time there's no reason why you shouldn't have read potters, if only to rip on it's stupid text and print edit techniques which are straight from elementary school to increase page count. some news give some context for reading some books though, like potters.. but it's different kind of reading when you read the news, because current events after all are current events and updates on past current events are still news. if you want to list what you've read in the past 4 weeks go ahead, it's easy enough, nobody's going to give a crap though and nobody's going to give a crap about these badges. though, how long till someone codes a firefox extension that gets you the badge levels?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.