Bacn

Rory over at Learn-Learn-Learn brought out another fun topic…Bacn (pronounced Bacon). I followed the link and watched a nice vid explaining the new phenomenon of Bacn.

Essentially the 2 coiners of the phrase, Bacn, define it as alerts you set up for yourself and then don’t have the time to keep up with reading them. The alerts therefore clutter up your inbox and serve to distract and frustrate you. The 2 Bacn-creators pin the origins of Bacn on Web 2.0.

I think they may be right about this. Bacn isn’t harmful, it is just a nice-to-do in my inbox. I could see extending this to many things in the Web 2.0 read/write world.

• Technorati Watchlists
• Speedyfeed Aggregators
• RSS Aggregators
• Google Alerts
• Blogrolls

All of which, I have and often don’t get the chance to follow up on consistently. This got me thinking about my research into how the use of blogs, wikis, and podcasts in training have on the worker performance of Gen Y employees.

If a company uses blogs for training and provides people an RSS feed for their inbox, what says the employee reads it or uses it? Nothing, that is what. Even if one could devise a read-receipt, it wouldn’t give any indicator of interaction. Likewise, would it fit into the Just-in-time world of corporate training? Not sure.

At any rate, I have Bacn and I just created a nice solution to keep my Bacn consumption under control. I use Mozilla Thunderbird’s News and Blogs component to subscribe to feeds. It keeps things out of my inbox and I can quickly come up to speed on things I am curious about.

Bacn!

Comments welcome.

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