Take away the description for a badge away.
Even take away what URLs you have to visit to get those badges. Some are quite obvious like the Perez Hilton one, if you've ever seen 'that' face on TV or anywhere. Some are quite obvious such as the Murloc for WoW and on and on and on...
Let's make this game a little more Passive when it comes to the LEAST of all Passive features here.
Yes, some will be painstakingly obvious what you have to do to get them, once someone gets one and declares it, such as hitting the 250 mine mark or some such landmark. The browsing ones will be a bit more ambiguous though.
I think the badges would be cool as a social tool "Hey, you are an xkcd addict too!" or "Hey, hey, what server do you play on?" or "What's your xbox live name?" so on and so forth...
How many "thumbbusters" do we have that don't even have a game system? How many people have the XKCD badge that have never heard of the semi-spontaneous meeting in a park at certain coordinates in Boston back on that fateful specific time and day?
Is there any way to except the PMOG popups from the CSS of the page? When mission lightposts or portals come up on their colored backgrounds but with the text and links colored and backgrounded to match the CSS of the page, sometimes they're unreadable.