A new term has started to emerge over the last several months to describe the SPAM you get that’s your own doing. The Term is BACN (note the Web 2.0-esque missing “o”). All of those mailing lists, Facebook notifications, Friendster blog-update alerts and Microsoft VS Developer notices were things that you thought you wanted to get in your inbox, but every time one comes in you just decide to turf it.

Image: jted on Flickr

This image really does illustrate the point nicely (though the Spam cut is probably a bit too small…). I have to admit, that despite the amount of junk email I get, and lots of it is Bacn, I still continue to sign up for notifications of things. I think it’s just the innate fear of missing something. This way I get all the information I might want to read someday, but most likely I’ll just ignore it.

According to the Wikipedia article, and a couple of other sources, the term Bacn was coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in August 2007. Apparently this is what you get when you cross over-zealous twiterers with Canadian bacon and a boring stint at the registration table.

I’ve noticed that I take a similar approach to some of the podcasts and other feeds I have subscribed. Even though I never actually read that feed from TechCrunch, I’m reticent to delete it because someday there might be a good story in there for a blog entry or some other purpose.

At the end of the day Bacn is self-inflicted, so I guess I’d better shut up and start fryin’.