Will Google News Badges Turn Online Reading into a Competitive Sport?

Google’s latest gambit to build traffic to its Google+ sharing network is the creation of Google News Badges. The search giant will now award badges to regular readers of Google News, something that they will be able to tout on Google Plus.

To earn badges, you must be signed into your Google Account and have Web history enabled. Then each time you read a story on Google News your reading choice will be recorded and its off to the races.

The important good news is that badges are turned off by default, so if you want to enter the browsing Olympics, you will have to turn them on. And if you’d prefer to keep some of your reading private, Google allows you to do that as well.

The unanswered question in all of this is whether acquiring News Badges will earn you authority points in some future social media algorythm. That could be a game changer.

Here’s a hint about whether Google thinks they can create a reading competition, In a posting explaining News Badges, Google helpfully points out that it’s better to read a few stories every day than try to cram them all into a single session.

So if you miss those bygone days of campfires and merit badges, take a whirl on Google News. At least you won’t have to sleep on hard ground. Source: