NPR: Is Bacn Filling Up Your Inbox?

Is Bacn Filling Up Your Inbox?

I love bacon. But it's not all good for you, and I'm not talking about the fat content.

NPR.org's Eric Weiner has a great piece about "bacn." (No, that is not a typo.) Don't know what bacn is? Bacn is, well, spam that you want (a concept that sends shivers down my spine, truth be told). Think bank statements, specials on pizza from your local store, notices from your kids' school or even news updates from NPR. It's stuff you want, but it can still slow you down and clog your Internet arteries, just like spam.

Bacn, like spam, can be annoying, but it's a specific kind of annoyance. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. An e-mail from your wife is not bacn — that's personal. An e-mail from Nigeria offering to send you $3 million is not bacn — that's spam. Bacn is everything in between, the "middle class of e-mail," [Tommy Vallier, a Canadian blogger] says.

There is also "FakinBacn" — spam that poses as bacn.

I'm getting a stomachache. But there may be a cure in the advice of Bruno Giussani, who's described as "a popular Swiss blogger" (that's a phrase you don't see too often). As Giussani says, you can just use e-mail filters to put your bacn into various folders in your e-mail program. Giussani doesn't think it's a big deal: "So five or six geeks meet at a conference, start tossing names around, and then pretend to have identified a new trend."

In the end, it all leads to various existential questions: If you leave bacn in your inbox too long, does it spoil? Does Weight Watchers send out low-fat bacn? And wouldn't Canadian bacn be ham?

5:16 PM ET | 08-29-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

I know what you mean. I ask for what I think will be an occasional email, that turns out to be several times a week to several times a day. There is something I really need to have from these people, so I cannot SPAM their names. It would be fantastic if we could SPAM it by content, and allow only the email we originally expected to come through. (Then I have a complaint about not receiving the mail I asked for, but that is a different story.)

Sent by Kristin Thomsen | 10:07 AM ET | 08-30-2007

I've a notion of something I like to call "sham". These are the "phony" messages you receive from "friends", such as the Facebook-style mass-distributed personal questions you might receive. Sham can be taken as a play on the terms spam, sham, and perhaps even shame (as in, shameful mass-emailing).

There's a certain difference between bacn and my notion of sham. Bacn seem commercial-oriented, sham are personal "pal"-messages. In other words, bacn consists of Facebook ads about additions to their site; sham includes Facebook questions from friends.

Sent by Harold J. Johnson | 1:03 PM ET | 08-30-2007

I don't see how "bacn" is a fitting term for email you don't want. If spam is unsolicited, junk email and ham is the email that you want, then this type of not-quite-unsolicited email should be called 'Bologna.' It's somewhere in between spam and ham. Bacon, on the other hand, is delicious and if the term were to be applied to email, it should surely indicate those emails that you look forward to with great anticipation.

Sent by Dave | 4:22 PM ET | 08-31-2007

I'm voting for calling it CLAM -- Consistent, Lame, Annoying Messages.

Sent by Jeanie Riddell | 12:47 AM ET | 09-01-2007

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