Two terms we spent a little time talking about this year made the New York Times 2007 Buzzword List. The Times takes the last Sunday of every year to review the year. Now, there are a lot of end of the year lists, but the Buzzword list is unique, fun and informative.

Bacn

Bacn, as you recall, is “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.”

Congrats to the Podcamp Pittsburgh folks for making “Bacn” one of 2007’s top buzzwords.

Email Bankruptcy

Email Bankruptcy is something most Boxbe users won’t ever have to declare, but we can’t guard against friends, family and colleagues expecting a response to every message they send you.

What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response.

Lawrence Lessig and Fred Wilson both famously declared email bankruptcy in the last couple of years. We wish them a better, more productive email life in 2008.

Other tech related terms from this year – crowdsourcing, life streaming, tumblelog, lolcat and one for Mark (our VP of Corp Dev and former CNN producer), I-reporter.

Read

This is a bit of a tougher problem. As I’ve been testing Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, I’ve realized that I get a lot of bacn and adding those senders to my list of approved emailers isn’t fun.

What is bacn?

If you’re like me ten minutes ago, you might be scratching your head. bacn, according to this video from Podcamp Pittsburgh last weekend, is the email that you want to receive, but it’s not immediately valuable. There has been a lot of discussion on the web of this “middle class” of email in the last few days.

People who add you as a friend on Facebook, shipping notices from Amazon, or bill pay notices from Wells Fargo could all be classified as bacn.

A few people in the blogosphere have protested the term, but as good as the real bacon might taste, it sure is something you shouldn’t eat all the time.

What to do with bacn?

What do you consider bacn? Better yet, what do you do with bacn?

Do you set up filters in your email? Do you just let it sit in your inbox? Personally, I use Apple Mail and have a number of filters set up to take these messages out of my inbox and into their own special little place.

Update: there is a great bacn discussion over at Lifehacker.

photo from Flickr user bahkubean