A couple of days ago I was fortunate enough to receive a complimentary copy of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Guerrilla Marketing" in my morning mail. The book is co-authored by Susan Drake and Colleen Wells, and from the immediate looks of things... this promises to be a fantastic read.

"You're no idiot, of course. You know that people won't spend their money on your product or service if they don't know it exists. But competing against the mega corporations means stretching your budgeting too thin. You need alternatives to high-priced convectional print and broadcast advertising."

"The Complete Idiot's Guide to Guerrilla Marketing offers exciting and cost-effective methods of promoting and publicizing your business. In this Complete Idiot's Guide, you get strategies for creating word-of-mouth buzz, the low down on Internet marketing via viral ads, email lists, streaming video, and more, unique ideas for marketing to your target base through unconventional venues, and tactics for product placement in the media.

Well, as always I appreciate the freebee. I'll be sure to give this book a read really soon, and of course I'll be providing my thoughts and a full-review. Until then... stay tuned.

WARNING: The following post contains a half-intelligent and over analyzed thought to which was spawned from deep within the depths of the author's brain. While in most cases, such thoughts would immediately have been acknowledged and then erased from existence, this particular thought seemed to have evaded the quality control police - the tiny little beings inside our brain that understand the difference between a good idea and a bad idea, and ensure that only good ideas are ever shared. In other words, this thought is armed and dangerous, and readers should proceed at their own risk.

I had a thought the other day, and while I am certain it is one that I should have left in limbo and forgot about, I just can't seem to let it go. For some strange reason or another, I feel the need to share it with someone... and why not all of you?

Ok, so I have come up with the perfect solution for ridding all junk mail from your email inbox. Scratch that. The perfect solution would be to permanently remove all spammers responsible for such junk email from earth. However, seeing how that is not likely going to happen anytime soon we'll just have to proceed with the second perfect solution... creating spam-filtering technology based off of the general male personality. I know, right? It's so brilliant.

It's certainly no secret that men and women communicate differently. While it would seem that both men and women understand the concept of talking, and thus have the ability to speak, I would argue that men and women don't quite share the same skill-set for when it comes to listening. I am of course referring to my fellow men, and our ability to block-out parts of any given conversation, if not entire conversations. Now usually one would only see this happen when conversing with a girlfriend or spouse, but I've personally experienced it outside of an intimate relationship. I'm sorry fellas, the jig is up!

Very similar to how pop-up blockers, email spam-filtering, and TiVo operate, a man's vocal spam-blocker is nothing more than his ability to filter out unwanted information from being pushed on to him. However, what sets it apart from the "all or nothing" blockers mentioned above is that a man's vocal spam-blocker offers a customizable experience in which each conversation is analyzed separately by a completely different set of rules.

For example, my internal vocal spam filtering technology understands that when I engage into a conversation with my mother in which she proceeds to turn a simple topic of discussion into a 20,000 word thesis, it needs to block me out from 100% of that conversation. However, when having a similar conversation with my fiancée, my spam filtering technology understands that the rules are different. Rather than blocking her out completely, it knows that I actually value her opinion and will want to hear what she has to say on a variety of topics.

I believe comedian Henry Cho explains it best in the opening seconds of this skit:

Pop-up blockers block all pop-ups. TiVo blocks out all commercials. And, generally speaking, email filters block out all messages pertaining to sex, Viagra discounts, and the like. While this would seem like an ideal solution to some, it leaves a lot to be desired for. For instance, what if I didn't mind pop-up advertisements or television commercials as long as each one I viewed was something worthy of being interrupted with? Or, what if I was someone who enjoyed viewing smut via email and wanted to save 50% on Viagra? These tools would be working against me rather than for me.

The idea of using a customizable approach, like the male vocal spam filter, is that each user would automatically apply different rules according to their interests at any given time throughout their life. When their interests change, so does your email filtering, pop-up blockers, and TiVo.

Sounds like a killer idea, doesn't it? Now if only if it were possible! The way I see it, we'll need a super-duper smart computer that can tap into our brains, understand what's important, what's not important, and what's desired at every moment of every day, and turn around and apply it to Internet, email, television, and the rest of our lives... thus saving us from having ever being exposed to unwanted information... aka spam.

Hell, it would have even saved you from wasting 3 minutes of your life reading this very post.