Doyce notes the New Slang of the Week:
Spam = Email you don’t want.
Bacon = Email you want, but not right now (google alerts, newletters, mailing list messages, etc).
And, yes, as he suggests I’ll argue that bacon, per se, is rarely something I don’t want right now, but bacon, in this context, is indeed a problem. It’s “information overload.”
So, for example, looking at my Google inbox — and bearing in mind that I’ve tossed most of the spam that wasn’t already caught, I have:
- Some ads/announcements from companies (e.g., Amazon) that I actually buy things from (so it’s not really spam).
- Some e-mail from some friends/family that’s very low priority to read.
- Some newsletters/mailing lists I do want to get around to reading, but not right now.
- An update from a site about the quality of Katherine’s school.
- Various e-mail exchanges from people I do want to talk with and would like to pay attention to as soon as updates come in.
- Some bill notifications that I need to review at some point, but not right now.
- Quite a few other things I want to look at, but not right now.
The problem is, how do I get the stuff I really want to read (let’s call it the fillet, since we’re on a meat kick immediately visible and read, without letting the bacon sink into obscurity such that it never gets read. That’s an extension of the problem of cutting out the spam but not the bacon, but it’s even more immediate.
The fact is, I get more e-mail that probably should be read than I can (or want to) read. That’s a personal time management issue, to some degree. But it’s also a reality. What I need is a personal assistant that’s quite a bit brighter than a spam filter or folder filter to go through and prioritize my e-mail for me. Unfortunately, GMail’s filters (and pretty much any other e-mail system I’ve seen that works on a keyword basis) isn’t up to that. We need a mail system that watches behavior and draw conclusions:
- Dave reads mail from these people as soon as it comes in. Make it high priority.
- This mail gets left around for a while. Make it medium priority.
- Dave reads this e-mail, sooner or later, before it gets deleted.
- Dave saves this e-mail for a while, but eventually deletes it.
- E-mail with these subject lines gets read faster than e-mail with these subject lines.
etc.
Heuristics. Bayesian filters (in reverse). Whatever. We need smarter software (or smarter people).
UPDATE: According to BoingBoing, it’s actually “bacn.” Don’t ask me why — I guess it sounds 1337.
Sadly, I have several hundred messages of “bacn” in my inbox. Oddly enough, I’d never heard the term before, despite following the fight against spam. (“Ham” has been used to indicate “mail you want” for several years.)
Hmm, there ought to be a term for a fourth category: mail that you asked for — so it isn’t really spam — but that can be dismissed at a glance and deleted. Alerts where the entire content is in the subject line, or brief recommendations that miss the target or tell you something you already knew, or “what’s next” blurbs from a theater such that one look at the show will tell you whether you want to mark it “to read” or just file it in the trash.
I guess in terms of priorities it would be about the same as bacn, so maybe it’s not so critical to give it its own category.
The term was apparently invented less than a week ago, and it’s already the Hit of the Internets.
For your suggested category – Pork Rinds? Small and easy to get rid of, but the crumbs end up all over the place.