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Bacn (pronounced bacon) is “the term given to electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time. Bacn is email you want but not right now”.

Already in Wikipedia, Bacn enjoys a real buzz all around. It was mentioned in almost all news media, received about 1,100 blog links according to technorati, has its own community, and for the cost of $24 will appear on your T-shirt. All in less than a week. I myself followed it from its early start (see *).
I think the Bacn buzz can teach us a lot about the making of internet buzz. I followed its seeds from the first few days (see the chronological overview). I learned that the combination of appreciated bloggers (as Chris Brogan), a twitter buzz, and a scoop in Wired were the milestones of its rise, all in less than 4 days. In 8 days it received the attention of The New York Times (it did take them long..).
Is Bacn a trend or fad?
Using my favorite trend tools – Google Trends (see graph 1) and BlogPulse (see graph 2), one can easily see that Bacn, reaching a peek on August (0.009% out of all citations in blog posts), has almost no trace on September. As can be seen in Google Trends graph, while this term was most searched for in Spain (I found it to be a cultural club in Argentina), it has been searched for in the USA (mainly California and New York), UK and Canada.
What do you think – is Bacn here to stay? Do we really need a phrase to describe mails which are not spam?
As I see it, Bacn is a trend. Not necessarily a trend for its original meaning, but a phenomenon we should follow. I think Bacn is all about us in search for initiating a buzz. It is all about the need to create, and the easy tools we have to make it grow.

Remember the formula: a catchy word + 1-2 influential bloggers + twitter (or other sms style spreading mechanism). 

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The rise of Bacn: Chronological overview:
Aug 18:
It all started in an unformal discussion taken place at PodCam Pittsburgh about “back bacon (aka canadian bacon) and how some people we know twitter so much we have to turn off notifications for them”. Following it was a post in techburgh 

Aug 19: Bacn appeared on Chris Brogan’s blog, on twitter

Aug 21: a community was started (the official Bacn web site), a post on Wired, on The Washington Post, on Cnet, and on Business forums (UKBusinessforums)

Aug 22: Bacn was mentioned on Jeff Pulver Blog, The Telegraph (UK), and on Boing Boing. 

Aug 24:  Bacn appeared on The Chicago Tribune

Aug 25: The New York Times

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Bacn on twitter:

 

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Graph 1: bacn search on Google (Google Trends)

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Graph 2: bacn on blog posts (BlogPulse)
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* On August 20, I spotted Bacn at Chris Brogan’s blog and immediately added it to my Facebook’s wall:

 

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Sphere: Related ContentFiled under web 2.0, trends, cybers, blog citation, google trends, internet behavior, bloggers, twitter, Nielsen BlogPulse, trends spotting tools, trends spotting behavior, trends targets & groups, buzz word having

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 2:09 am and is filed under Google AdSense, Web 2.0, Wikipedia. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.