I’ll be honest; at first, I didn’t see much value for users in the Google News badges (for your favorite topics). Why? It seemed redundant. And because sometimes I start to feel overwhelmed by all the widgets, badges, location-based services, photo-sharing sites, social media connectors, and whatever else from which we have a million different options to choose. However, badges are not the same as saving things to your “favorites” folders. The news badges function as filters you can personalize to seek specific topics in the news so that you have more control over the sorts of things you read rather than search engines deciding what they think you want to hear about and returning predetermined results.
There have been discussions about being in a tech bubble or a filter bubble. Eli Pariser is the author of “The Filter Bubble”, which confronts the issue that personalized search may be limiting our worldview. During his talk on filter bubbles he asserts that the major players in the tech field should at least give online users the right to choose what they want to be informed about. Still, we can shoot ourselves in the foot, because sometimes there are things we need to hear that we don’t want to hear. It’s like going to the same restaurant every single time you go out to eat: you’re going to miss out on things — not only different types of food, but different social and cultural experiences. But with Google News badges, we can police ourselves, so to speak. We can set up badges for topics we’d like to become more educated on, not just things with which we’re already comfortable or familiar.
When you set up your badges, the purpose and graphical element functions like an equalizer on musicequipment. The EQ’s filter out unwanted frequencies or signals and bring up the desired “sound” or news. You can set the topic bars to the desired amount of how much news you want to cover sports, organic farming, music, technology, etc. News badges are private by default but you can opt to share them however you like.
Click here to check out how they work!
