Seldom has the arc of a neologism been so visible. On the afternoon of August 18, 2007, standing at the PodCamp Pittsburgh registration desk, Tommy Vallier, Andy Quale, Ann Turiano, Jesse Hambley, and Val and Jason Head—all participants in the city’s annual social media conference—were having a conversation about Canadian bacon. Vallier informed the group that peameal bacon was an alternate name for the breakfast meat, leading others to comment that peameal sounded like email. This coincidence in turn reminded them of a prior discussion about all the automatic email notifications they received daily, from Google news alerts to Facebook updates, which were becoming almost as distracting as spam. They decided it was a problem, and their banter about peameal and pork suggested a name. Since the notifications were a cut above spam—after all, these updates had been requested—they dubbed this “middle class” of email bacn. The following day the six PodCampers held a spontaneous group session with several dozen of their fellow social media mavens, who were swiftly won over by the jokey name and ironic spelling (a play on sites such as Flickr and Socializr then popular). The web address bacn2.com was acquired—bacn.com was already taken by a bacon distributor and bacn.org belonged to the Bay Area Consciousness Network—and a droll public service announcement explaining the time-wasting dangers of bacn was promptly posted on YouTube. What happened next was best explained by PodCamp’s cofounder Chris Brogan to the Chicago Tribune five days later. “The PodCamp event was about creating personal media,” he said, “so 200-something reporters, so to speak, launched that story as soon as they heard it.” The term was written up on hundreds of personal blogs, bringing it into Technorati’s top fifteen search terms and leading Erik Schark to muse on BoingBoing that the spread of bacn showed “the ridiculous power of the internet.” Schark also listed the mainstream media that had covered it, including CNET, Wired , and the Washington Post, where Rob Pegoraro complained about the name: “Bacon is good,” he opined.