I liked the original idea of PMOG (now http://thenethernet.com/ http://thenethernet.com/) which seems similar: you would get points for exploring various sites

I liked the original idea of PMOG (now http://thenethernet.com/ http://thenethernet.com/) which seems similar: you would get points for exploring various sites of the internet and level up your character by doing so. What interested me was maybe some kind of feedback loop for correcting my self image. Perhaps I think I like to read lots of highly intellectual stuff, but my character would turn out to hang out on celebrity gossip sites a lot. Presumably then I could try to take counter action by reading more intellectual stuff, correcting my self image/alter ego. In the end I never played, first because of privacy concerns, then because it didn't work with my browser. I suppose those news badges are kind of the same thing, just not presented in an equally appealing way. So instead of making me think "yay, they made reading news even more fun", I think "they are trying to exploit a weakness of my stone age brain to make me do even more work for them for free". Yuk.