AbbaGav

Ever play message in a bottle?

Let's blog it. Our links are our bottle, the blogosphere is our ocean. Lets see how far our links get and where they go.

This post played from:
http://abbagav.blogspot.com
(paste your source's permalink in place of my link)

Everyone who played off this post should have a link in the comments. Feel free to click and follow the chain to its start, or follow it out to see how far its gone.

Here's how to play:

1) Make a game post in your blog. Ideally, it should have a copy of these game rules copied from the site you are playing off of so that anyone finding your game post and wanting to play will know how. The title should be "Blog in a Bottle - Nth Generation" where you pick N as being one more than the number in the site you are playing off of.

2) Take a permalink from the site you are playing off of, and copy it into the "Parent Post" slot in your game post. Do the best you can to make sure when you paste the permalink that it is a link, so that it is easy for everyone else to click on it and follow it back to the source.

3) Publish your game post--but you're not quite done yet. We need to let players find each other and follow the chain, so...

4) Take a permalink of your just published post.

5) Copy your permalink into the comments section of the post you played from. This lets every player find all the branches that came from his or her post, and allows us to click forward and backward through the game links.

It is ok to have more than one person build off the same link, it will just make a tree-like structure out it.

IMPORTANT: the game expires at the end of April 2005. If it is after April 2005, don't copy and paste. We are not trying to create an infinite bandwidth suck, just watching how far the bottle floats from shore by the end of the month.

And feel free to explore the blogs you meet along the way and pass on a kind word or two to the other players.

Some people will prefer to play off the blog where they first found it (maybe your site), even if others have also already branched from your post. This creates branches in our game tree.

And some will prefer to follow from your comments section out to the farthest end of one of your branches, trying to get the farthest, highest numbered post possible. Either one is fine, it's all fun!

Suggestion: When you play of a link, also copy your permalink into any "ancestor link" (clicking each parent, and parent's parent, etc.) where your generation is higher than any generation noted in the comments in that post already. That way, if you look back to the original post, at http://abbagav.blogspot.com, you will see the farthest out post recorded there all the time (hint for those who prefer to go for a higher generation number). And each post along the way will also know what is the farthest out post to have played off of it.

What are the requirments to play? Just a blog that supports permalinks and accepts comments from anyone (if you don't have those two things, you won't be able to link into the game).