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Bacn

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For the airborne communications relay and gateway, see BACN.

Bacn (pronounced like bacon) is email that has been subscribed to and is therefore not unsolicited, but is often not read by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as "email you want but not right now."[1][2]

Bacn differs from spam in that the recipient has signed up to receive it. Bacn is also not necessarily sent in bulk. Some examples of common bacn messages are news alerts, periodic messages from e-merchants one has made previous purchases with, messages from social networking sites, and wiki watch lists.[3]

The name bacn is meant to convey the idea that such email is "better than spam, but not as good as a personal email".[4] It was originally coined in August 2007 at PodCamp Pittsburgh 2[5], and since then has become popular amongst the blogging community.[citation needed]

The word has also attracted attention in the professional email marketing community. Commentators have welcomed the distinction from spam and used the term to focus businesses on the need to improve the quality and value (to the recipient) of these kinds of transactional messages.[6] A March 2011 infographic from Unsubscribe.com claims that over 27 billion bacn emails were sent every day in 2010.[7]


Backstory

At PodCamp Pittsburgh 2 in 2007, Valerie Head, Tommy Vallier, Andy Quayle and Jesse Hambley were discussing the differences between different meats from different countries. Tommy is Canadian, Andy is British, Valerie and Jesse are American. The conversation turned to (actual) Bacon. While discussing the various types of bacon, "Tommy Vallier mentioned that back bacon is also called peameal bacon."[8] After that, similarities were drawn between the sound of 'peameal' and 'email' and the term 'Bacn' was soon coined to reference solicited email that seemed as invasive in a users inbox as spam. [9]

The lack of the letter 'o' in 'Bacn' is typical of Web 2.0 terms, and dates from the year 2007. A trend in the industry was, and still is, to skip a letter in company or service names, so 'bacon' led to 'Bacn'.

The story, while little known, really is that simple. The popularity of the term attests to the power of Social Media and the PodCamp unconferences. The term was tweeted about, blogged, podcasted and more and spread like wildfire around the World.[10]

See also

References

  1. ^ "PodCamp Pittsburgh 2 cooks up Bacn". PodCamp Pittsburgh. August 23, 2007. Retrieved 2010-03-15.
  2. ^ Barrett, Grant (2007-12-23). "All We Are Saying". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-12-24. Bacn: Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like. Popularized at the PodCamp conference in Pittsburgh in August.
  3. ^ Email overload? Try Priority Inbox - Google Gmail Blog, 30 Aug 2010
  4. ^ NPR: Move Over, Spam: 'Bacn' Is the E-Mail Dish du Jour
  5. ^ "PCPGH invented BACN". Viddler. October 16, 2008. Retrieved 2011-03-23.
  6. ^ Bacn is good for email marketing
  7. ^ [1]
  8. ^ Head, Val. "bacn - how it all got started". Retrieved 30 March 2011.
  9. ^ "PCPGH Invented BACN". http://blog.viddler.com/brandice/pcpgh-invented-bacn/. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help)
  10. ^ Mitchell, Dan. "Chick if you read this article". http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/business/25online.html?ref=business. New York Times. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help)


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