Here's an interesting idea:

Take the concept of the chain letter and apply it to blogging. How does this work? Simply take a list like this:

1. I love MLM Blog
2. Fax Marketing
3. Jack Squatro
4. DidYouSmellThat
5. TurboRecruiting
6. RyanShamus
7. Martial Arts Supplies
8. The Renegade Network Marketer
9. Murphs On.com
10. MLM Training

…and remove the top entry. Move everyone else up the list by one position and put your link at the (now blank) #10 position.

Why do this? The idea is to help your blog to get more easily found on the internet.

Is it ethical?

I go with the camp that when you are dealing with machines, ethics does not even come into play. The internet and the complexities behind how everything is tied together is just one big machine. So even if this little test were manipulative of the machine, it wouldn't matter.

Where you can start talking about ethics and the internet is where you start coming in contact with the people using that machine. We may not be able to harm the machine, but can we do something to the machine that can harm people. The answer to that question is a big YES and that's proven out every day by the number of absolutely crappy emails people get every day.

That kind of manipulation of "the machine" is not only harmful to the people who have to deal with the junk in their email (and maybe even going to thier kids' email), but it's a huge resource drain on the rest of the system. There are ethics to doing business on the internet just as there are to doing business anywhere else. There are appropriate ways to advertise and there are definitely inappropriate ways to advertise.

For example, with this little viral blogging experiment the original instructions were to make a blog post with the list, then go to 100 other blogs and ask them to do the same.

Not gonna do it.

I found the list myself by doing a search for [tag-tec]MLM online[/tag-tec]. I found a few blogs and the one outlining this experiment looked interesting so I thought I would play along. It might help me rank for [tag-tec]MLM training[/tag-tec] and it might not. Either way, it's wasn't a lot of effort and it gives everyone a chance to think about how to get your message out.