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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August 21st, 2007 at 9:16 PM
Wow. I was totally unaware that there was a phrase for those alerts. Thanks for sharing!
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September 13th, 2007 at 4:11 AM
Help for Bacn! This isn’t anything mindblowing, but a simple solution for Gmail users…
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/gmail-eats-your-bacn.html
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September 13th, 2007 at 12:19 PM
Joel,
Simple, zen, beautiful. It is handy to have those folders, boy I use them. Trying to set up some routing rules is more complicated. I’m still using my newsreaders and really making some decisions about the lists I am on, often looking for an RSS feed or requesting one from the admin. Thanks for the comment, Bacn is coming into it’s own here.
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