fling93 loves fishies

Meming for a Free Signed Comic Book!

Yes, this is a meme, but wait! You can get a free comic book and raise your Google PageRank, all without leaving the comfort of your own home! So read on to find out more!

I generally don’t like posting memes because they feel like a cheat. You don’t really write much of anything, but just pass on something that you found on someone else’s blog. Yet a couple of memes have gotten me a surprising amount of traffic. The first one was Rain Songs, where I just listed my favorite songs about rain. That silly post has persistently been one of my most visited posts in the past several months. I have no idea why, but I’m grateful to David for starting it.

The other one was the meme propagation experiment by Nova Spivack. Indeed, I didn’t write anything in that post, merely reproducing the original meme content. That kinda bothered me, but from the instructions it sounded like he want the original text untouched (although I later found out that it was okay to add intro text). I normally wouldn’t have bothered participating, but it sounded like an interesting experiment (plus Spivack was the one who wrote the excellent piece on the blogosphere becoming a global brain, that I linked to earlier). And despite not including any original content, the meme post got a lot of hits.

Spivack has since done a bunch of other memes (GoMemes, as he’s been calling them) ostensibly designed to raise the visibility of all the blogs that participated through what seemed like a weird Ponzi scheme, only without the part about losing all your money. I’d planned on joining in, but I kinda felt like he was getting carried away with the whole meme thing. And none of them really seemed to have that stickiness which was one of the key ingredients cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Plus, I don’t really get linked to all that often anyway, which kinda made it a moot point.

But I found this meme from Ealasaid involving a free autographed comic book. I’m not a fan of Dave Sim or Cerebus, but I like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book (who knew Death could be such a hottie?), and free stuff is always cool. I’ll try and combine this meme with Spivack’s “GoMeme” format to see what happens. If you’d like to participate (and hopefully, it will boost your traffic and raise your Google pagerank), copy everything starting from the row of asterisks on down.

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Neil Gaiman points out an offer for a free Cerebus comic book autographed by Dave Sim:

Dave Sim has made an extremely generous offer to readers of this journal (and indeed, to readers not of this journal, but just people who simply hear about his offer elsewhere on the Internet. Memes propagate, after all), which is the kind of offer that I found as interesting as he did. It’s this:

If you’d like to read one of the Sandman parody issues of Cerebus, Dave will send you one. He’ll send it to you very happily, free of charge. He will sign it for you, too. And he won’t charge you a thing. Not even postage.

And if you’re wondering what the catch is, it’s this: Dave wants to know (as, I have to admit, do I) how many of the people out there in internet-land will actually go and do things that don’t involve passively clicking on a link and going somewhere interesting. So what you have to do is write Dave a letter (not an e-mail. Dave doesn’t have e-mail) telling him that you read that he’ll send you a signed Cerebus, and telling him why you’d like him to send you a copy. It’s as easy as that. And, quite possibly as difficult.

The address to write to is:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674 Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Dave, I suspect, thinks he’ll get a handful of requests. In my more pessimistic moments, I think he’s right, although I’d love it if he got deluged with letters, like those kids in hospitals who don’t exist but are still collecting postcards…

So go ahead and send him a letter if you want the comic, but even if you don’t, post this on your blog so that others will flood Dave with tons of letters, causing Canada to sink into the ocean. And if this meme works, you should also get your Google PageRank increased, so you can’t lose!

Instructions: Just copy this post starting from the above asterisks and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List
1. Neil Gaiman
2. Ego, Ego, Ego!
3. fling93 loves fishies
4. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)