Anyone who uses email regularly has had the experience of having your comments misinterpreted. Either you say something funny that the email recipient takes seriously or you say something serious that they think is a joke. Small wonder that the instant messaging crowd invented little signals like LOL to let you know that, "Oh I get it. That was supposed to be funny. Har Har."

Some people can’t get sarcasm when you say it to their face. So trying to get a little snotty sarcasm across in an email can really get tricky. But there is help out of the horrible dilemma of email sarcasm (and yes, I was being a little sarcastic there). That help comes from the good folks at SarcMark.

SarcMark simply invented a new form of punctuation that sort of works like an exclamation point. That punctuation is named, not surprisingly, the SarcMarc. The good news is that it’s a pretty simple little doodad to read. It is nothing more than an upside down swirl with a dot in the middle, like a reverse "at sign". And you can always download it from the website that the SarcMark Company has set up for you.

SarcMarc can be used in any kind of communications you want including email, instant messaging or even in Word documents just in case you want to get snotty in your weekly status report to the boss. This may not be the most important invention since Google. But its pretty cool.

Ed: bah $1.99 for a funny symbol? And here I was ready to go back and SarcMarc all the previous blog posts. Oh well, guess will stick to the old fashion way </sarcasm>