UberNoggin

I love how quickly an idea can pass around the net. From blog to video to IM to microblog…bouncy ideas abound. The latest is Bacn. According to Lifehacker (a blog you should read if you’re not) Bacn is:

“Email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”

The term came about last week and has already spread across the webosphere. Here are just a few links to follow to learn more:

• The Official Bacn2 Blog
• Bacn on BuzzFeed
• Technorati hits on Bacn
• IJustine’s video of the original Podcamp discussion that spawned the term

Beyond the amazing meme-speed of the internet, there are other important implications of the Bacn fad. First, it’s a symptom of info overload created by “pull.” All of the updates, notices, and feeds that we love and laud as being time savers might just be overwhelming us. I get about 30 emails a day from a couple of mailing lists I’m a member of, about 5 Facebook notices, about 10 Twitter notices, and a few other random updates from Slideshare, Google alerts etc. All in all this adds up to about 80+ emails a day that I don’t have to open but might not want to delete either. We all knew what Bacn was before the meme started because we’ve all shuffled emails into a “read later” folder or somehow marked them to be worth saving but not worth reading right away. It seems we’re working toward a balance between “push” and “pull” that will be important to watch as new kinds of info filtering apps come along.

Second, Bacn is interesting as a phenomenon because once a problem/issue is given a name there are sure to be apps developed to help us all deal with it. I, for one, use labels on my gmail to help me know which emails are vital and which can be shuffled into the “later” pile but I’m sure it won’t be a week before there is a “Bacn filter” or a “KrspyBacn” app to help us stratify bacn into different types. Will there be “Canadian Bacn”, “Turkey Bacn”, “FaknBacn”?

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