The Petri Project

Coined at the recent PodCamp Pittsburgh (an internet-geek festival that took place last weekend), “bacn” is the sizzlin’ new term for “email you want, but not right now.” Considered a step above spam, but below personal communications, bacn refers to notification emails from sites like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn that let you know someone wants to be your friend (or prove it with winky comments). A byproduct of Web 2.0, bacn also encompasses all those email newsletters you signed up for and really, truly mean to read sometime, as well as bill payment notifications, Google alerts, etc. Basically, bacn is clutter, but not trash.

Blogger Eric Skiff says the “sneaky evil” of bacn is its “attention breaking ability.” Since we have some genuine interest in these emails, we’re more apt to be distracted by them. As he puts it, “All of those little flow-interrupters mean that you spend a lot of your day getting back up to speed on whatever you were working on before you… hang on, there’s another email… eh, more comments on my photos, back to… wait, what was I doing?”

Skiff says the best way he’s found to have his bacn and eat it too is by consolidating all his email accounts into gmail, where the filtering occurs before emails ever hit the inbox. So there’s no pop-up notification, and you are free to read all your newsletters and friend requests in tidy little files whenever you need a “brain break.” Skiff claims this “batching” system saves him “at least 30 minutes a day.”

Like its namesake, bacn has an alluring scent. A mere six days after the term was invented, the smell of bacn was wafting through cyberspace, with mentions on Boing Boing, Wired, the Washington Post, The New York Times, and of course, countless blogs. Aside from email filtering, no one seems to be offering innovative ways to cure bacn. But the bacn website promises to share solutions in the near future, and encourages us to raise awareness with their make your own bacn t-shirt widget. We can only hope the next step is a bacn e-newsletter subscription.

Photo credit: elkit on Flickr.