Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

I learned a new term over the weekend, and it’s called Bacn! What is Bacn? No, it’s not the delectable bacon that you eat for breakfast, instead it’s the new term for emails that are a cross between spam and personal mail. Here’s a message regarding Bacn from the people who coined the new word:

Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, 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.

We are a group of like-minded individuals who have realized the problem of bacn, and are out to find a solution. You can now join the discussion in our forum and help us further define bacn as we begin our efforts to manage our bacn. Bacn was first used during an impromptu discussion about email and spam during Podcamp Pittsburgh.

The slogan for Bacn might give you some more insight as to what it actually is: "Email you want, but not right now." I agree that this really is a problem, and the closest thing I’ve found for solving this problem is to use Gmail filters. Even still there has got to be a better way to manage it, and I’ve come up with one solution thus far.

–A Possible Solution–

A pattern that I’ve noticed between all of my Bacn is that all I really care about is the subject line and possibly one hyperlink inside of the body. For example, I’ll see a notification of a new message popup on my computer when I receive an email, and if it’s Bacn I often know what the contents of the email are without even opening it.

For that reason there has got to be a way to display Bacn in a more condensed fashion. Maybe within a sidebar in your email account that shows recent "headlines" from addresses you’ve tagged as Bacn? And then you can select what the headlines hyperlink to, such as the third hyperlink in the message. Because let’s face it…most Bacn only has one hyperlink that is important to us and it’s typically in the same position every time (thanks to the use of email templates).

–My Bacn–

I thought it would be fun if we all shared the various types of Bacn that we get. I receive about a dozen or so Bacn messages per day, and they are often from the following list:

• Pownce notifications
• Twitter notifications
• Facebook notifications
• Signup confirmations
• Welcome to…
• Bank alerts
• eBay notifications
• Status reports
• Newsletters
• Google Blog Search alerts
• SlickDeals alerts

So hit us up in the comments with how much and what type of Bacn you receive!

Source: Boing Boing

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• CyberNotes: Using Gmail Filters