Until recently, we all spoke of ham and spam. The two defined types of mail we receive. Good mail came from friends, colleagues and interesting sources. Bad mail came from strangers who tried to offer us millions of pounds held in a Nigerian bank account or questioned our manhood.

However, over the past year, a new grey area has grown out of control. It’s that stuff lodged between ham and spam. It’s lovingly nicknamed bacn, “the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company”, according to Lifehacker.

Our inboxes are becoming giant bacn sandwiches, filled with information you don’t mind receiving but that you don’t necessarily have time to triage right now.

If like me, you also check your email over mobile, dealing with bacn is becoming more problematic by the day. I use the Gmail app for S60, which is great, but only shows 20 new email headers per screen. When most of these are Facebook messages, LinkedIn invites and WordPress comment moderation notices, the real email gets lost. So how do you deal with bacn?

Three steps towards a clearer inbox

1. Get rid of the excess fat

Cut out any mailings you receive that you don’t want or need at all. Whether it’s that knitting mailing list you joined “by mistake”, that newsletter you’ve got little interest in, or those wiki entry modification notices you forgot to turn off, just take half an hour to unsubscribe from anything that isn’t relevant anymore.

You’ve probably joined many social networks in the past few years. Some died, some are still going strong, and some are barely still alive, plugged into an oxygen mask and a shrinking investment budget. I bet you could close your account on a number of these sites right now and not miss them at all.

Be ruthless. Anything important enough will come back onto your radar to be re-added later, so better scrap more than too little. Important news and people will find you if they’re desperate to do so.

2. Consider your options

Almost every social network or mailing list has notification options. Have a look at your inbox and for every automated email you receive from one of these services, consider whether you really need the email. You know, the notification will still be visible on the system when you log in. Do you need that mailing list to spew 45 messages at you a day, or should you switch to receive the daily digest? Can you replace it with an RSS feed alternative?

Is it any use to find out immediately when a random punter adds you as a friend of Flickr? Or can you just find out next time you log in to upload pictures?

Now, this rule is like Play-doh and needs to be modeled to your very unique preferences.

3. “Iz nice thx but is not mah bucket”

You’re now onto the last round. Hopefully, there are only a few lucky remaining bacn rashers left now. It only takes a few networks to spew out a lot of reminders, notifications and invites, and while they’re of interest, they might not be an essential read right now.

No matter what email client you use, odds are you can set rules. These serve as buckets for all the automated emails you receive, leaving you with a clean inbox and the opportunity to check them at your own leisure.
Simply set the rule to move the offending bacn automatically to the correct folder on arrival.

Three simple rules, a tidier inbox.

PS – As an aside, my funny bone was highly tickled by the discovery of Bacon Strips Adhesive Bandages. Nothing quite like a bacon rasher to soothe an injury!

[* Ahem, need I point out that the designers were not involved in the creation of the image at the top?]

[tags]Bacn, spam, email, inbox, productivity, organisation, mail, taptu, taptology[/tags]

“Does anyone have a charger for a Sony Ericsson phone?” shouted across the office. Negative head shaking from everyone. Email to mates saying “Meet you at 6.30. Don’t ring me, phone out of battery.”

Common scenario, isn’t it? I’m hopeless when it comes to chargers and adapters. I always manage to misplace them, leaving me with a frantic scavenger hunt for a Nokia charger while my N95 expires with one last low battery beep.

The Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP), a forum of leading phone operators and manufacturers including heavyweights Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG, has agreed to make micro-USB the connector standard on all its future hardware.

“With UK consumers changing their handset on average twice a year there are hundreds millions of chargers and data cables in circulation,” says a statement from the group.

Of course, there’s no mention of timescales, but it’s a step in the right direction, towards a more practical way of connecting devices. I, for one, am thrilled at the idea of carrying less peripherals with me on a daily basis!

[Via PC Pro and InfoSync]

Not exactly what I’d describe as “light” Friday afternoon reading, but certainly entertaining is Stephen Fry’s first blog post on his fascination with mobile devices going back as far as the early “electronic organisers”.

For me it’s an addiction. Swapping SIMS, syncing, testing, probing, playing. I can’t pretend I’ve any higher purpose. What cars are to some, SmartPhones are to me – much, much more than just a functional tool. We live in the age of these devices. It should be the age of the greatest imaginative drive, flair and creativity in the digital arena. I am disappointed that not everyone in the industry sees it that way.

As the General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer has it, “I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart.” Amen.

Last night, we started emailing some of the beta testers, the early birds who signed up before everyone else. Ricky, at Symbian-Guru, is already sharing his first impressions of Taptu, and we’re thrilled to see he likes what he sees.

You will have it bookmarked in your mobile phone (I’ll put money on it). It’s a mobile optimized search tool, allowing you to easily find information about a topic from numerous sources. [...] TapTu is something new, but I’m already liking where it’s going. Rather than just giving me a bunch of web links to sites mentioning Jerry Jeff (or whatever topic) I get a good selection of relevant information from various mediums.

Launching a new product is like having a party. You can’t help but be anxious about who will turn up, what they’ll think of the party, or whether anyone will turn up at all. It’s still early, but it looks like this will be a cracking party!

Big excitement here at Taptu yesterday evening. After 8 months of design and engineering we went live with the first of our private beta invites. We’re keeping it to a very small early group for the first couple of weeks. Then we’ll be opening it up to a larger private beta before we launch at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco in the middle of October. Very promising early feedback so far, and now we’re just itching to take it public. (By the way, you can join the beta mailing list here)

Very nice of Rudy de Waele to praise our “super-simple design interface”. You can’t imagine how much effort has gone into getting this right. Since January we’ve run 7 studies in our new user experience lab testing different aspects of the UI, that’s 70 users giving us their candid opinion from hands-on use and abuse of our prototypes.

Our engineering team have done a pretty amazing job since we started in January. We took the decision to use open source infrastructure components wherever we could, but this still left a lot of gaps to fill if we were going to deliver on our goal of a fully-clustered, triple-redundant, fault-tolerant architecture running on commodity 1U servers, scaleable to millions of users. An architecture which also has to serve results pages in an optimised and reliable way to hundreds of different handsets across a multiplicity of GSM and CDMA mobile networks. Now we’ve taken a very big step closer towards this goal.

Our novel social-assisted search (SAS) approach means that we also have to write custom crawlers and parsers for each content category (music, movies, sports, etc) which we point at our selected social Web source sites. Now we have the basic infrastructure for all this in place we can begin to add additional content categories at a much faster pace. So expect to see a rapid expansion of the scope of our system over the next 6 months.

Today, Taptu is a universal mobile search engine, but the SAS optimization approach is only applied to music. With SAS switched on, we can give you useful results almost all the time in 10 clicks or less. Without it, we fall back to the 25 or more clicks that you normally see in today’s mobile search engines. So for searches outside music, Taptu doesn’t perform any better today than the big 3 mobile search engines (for us, the big 3 means Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) . This will change as we switch on SAS for other big categories like movies, travel, sport, games, and mobile web. Then you’ll really see what SAS can do.

The ever-eloquent Peter Ha from CrunchGear writes a post entitled “SMS 2.0? Wha? Huh? Noooooo!”.

Via TechTicker, Peter uncovered UK’s Affle (come again?) and India’s Airtel’s masterplan to spruce up the SMS advertising landscape with some 2.0 technology of their own. How does it work?

There is a cache of ads and content stored on the phone which is periodically update during the day (through a background action via GPRS). Each time the user opens his messaging window, an initial item—which could be a content or an ad—is pulled from the cache based on the user relevance. To enhance user experience this item is usually a relevant content (approx 75% of times)

I don’t think any relevancy could make up for the kind of interruption they’re suggesting. I’m usually in a rush when I want to send a text message, the last thing I need is an extra obstacle to getting my message through to a friend!

Dear Aunt Enna,

Bobby the drummer

Dear Bobby,

Now I’m no attorney, so I’ve consulted legal eagle Nilay Patel at Engadget to give you some answers.

To put it simply, it’s legal to make ringtones from album tracks you own. Since making a ringtone doesn’t count as a derivative work, you’re not infringing any copyrights. The exception, because there’s always got to be one, comes in the form of the iTunes Music Store, whose licensing rights don’t extend to ringtones. Pretty simple, unh?

Regardless of law, I beg you, please think twice before putting everyone around you through the pain of “Dancing Queen” at eight in the morning on the train.

Love & teacakes,
Aunt Enna

Yesterday, I visited the Nokia offices in Helsinki, Finland and had the opportunity to look at the latest range of handsets and technologies being developed. While there are no groundbreaking announcements to make and no fuzzy spy pictures to share, I did get a video of a mad pet project (no pun intended!) of some Nokia team members.

The N800, a large touchscreen internet tablet, was released some eight months ago and this has to be my favourite use of it so far.

The robot dog is controlled via another N800 tablet and has a range of predefined actions it can do. Great fun!

On Friday, the mobile phone celebrated 20 years of growth and development, which means that, thankfully, phones have gone from the size of a briefcase to a tiny, multi-featured smartphone.

On 7 September 1987, 15 phone firms signed an agreement to build mobile networks based on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications.

According to the GSM Association there are more than 2.5 billion accounts that use this mobile phone technology.

Adoption of the technology shows no signs of slowing down with many developing nations becoming keen users of mobile handsets. [BBC News]

For some of us, it’s difficult to even imagine life without mobiles. It’s become something of a lifeline; finding information and planning our social lives wouldn’t be the same without this ubiquitous means of communication.

It seems fit then that today, hundreds of mobile industry people are getting together in Helsinki for the Mobile Monday Global Summit. Some pics of the event are already being posted on Flickr. Well, what did you expect from a bunch of mobile geeks?

The many faces of Search: Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jimmy Wales, Danny Sullivan, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Rand Fishkin and baby Taptu

There’s a debate raging in the blogosphere on the merits of algorithmic search (e.g. Google) vs human-powered search (e.g. Mahalo). It started at the end of last year, when Jimmy Wales got plenty of airtime talking about Search Wikia – a different approach to human-powered search. More recently, Scoble has stoked up the debate and has taken a lot more flak for advocating human-powered search as the way of the future. So much so that he was forced to go mea culpa on some of his debating points. But to paraphrase Scoble, what if there really is 10% real fruit juice in his drink?

The constraints of algorithmic search show up most clearly in challenging environments like mobile search. It’s the most challenging environment for search today because of the small screens, severe bandwidth constraints and high latencies associated with mobile networks. Talented teams have been trying for more than five years to make algorithmic search which works well on the desktop work well on mobile. We are still at less than 1% of the usage volume of desktop search.

But human-powered search as advocated by Jason Calacanis is not the whole answer either. Responding to Rand Fishkins rebuttal of Scoble, Julie Magro sums it up in a nutshell:

“I think you are right about the scalability issue. For a general search like HDTV, the Mahalo results seem to be better. But how can they consistently produce these results for searches that cannot be easily categorized?

For example, someone I know was recently diagnosed with Sarcoidosis. I got the email, did a Google search and within minutes found out what it was, how to treat it, and where to research it even more by doing a Google search (all with a baby in the other hand). I just tried the same serach on Mahalo…no results from them, they had to give me the Google results. The reason people use Google is because it works consistently for them. They know where to go to find answers.”

But let’s not throw Scoble’s and Wales’ baby out with the bathwater. There is a third way in search – Social-Assisted Search – which can potentially combine the best of both worlds. What is Social-Assisted Search? A virtuous combination of Long Tail coverage as previously delivered only by the algorithmic engines, and social accuracy as expressed in human voting and editorial judgement. Hardly anyone is talking about it – when I search on the phrase in Google today it is actually a Googlewack – a web metrics guy named Marshall Sponder seems to have invented the phrase.

As of 2007 the Social Web gives Long Tail coverage in way that it didn’t a few years ago. Illustrating this, Wikipedia does pretty well on Julie’s Sarcoidosis example. Similarly, MySpace provides rather amazing Long Tail coverage of songs – we’ve counted 8.5 million of them as of September 2007.

Humans are good at classifying the Web into categories then locating and aggregating the encyclopaedic sources for those categories (by encyclopaedic I mean comprehensive, and not literally encyclopedia-like). Machines are good at crawling and indexing and ranking the content contained and listed by these sources – that’s what a search engine does. A Social-Assisted Search engine that combines these processes would give you the holy grail of very pure and relevant search results and pretty good Long Tail coverage. The price you would pay compared to algorithmic search would be a reduction in the variety of results. You might end up with an index of 1 billion pages rather than the 20 billion plus index of the full Web.

On the desktop this price is probably not worth paying. But on mobile, where the user gets punished much more heavily when they inspect candidate results (by having to perform many more clicks and scrolls because of the small screen size, and sitting waiting for the wireless network to respond) this price IS worth paying.

Over the last 18 months at Taptu we have found Social-Assisted Search to be the most fruitful line of enquiry by far in the quest to bring about a quantum improvement in the performance of mobile search engines Delivering on the promise is a big engineering effort, so it’s going to take a while before Social-Assisted Search can match or beat the best of the algorithmics. But it’s coming.