Grab the nearest book.

Open the book to page 23.

Find the fifth sentence.

Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

OK then:

However you should be careful about creating transports or bridges as it may violate the usage policies for foreign services.

Hard to tell what kind of book this is, right? It's "Instant Messaging in Java" by Iain Shigeoka which I happen to have at work.

I found this on Ted's blog and Ted references Danah Boyd... There's a certain etiquette in the blogosphere which is to credit where you got something like this. But neither Ted nor Ted's creditee invented this so I started following links because I wanted to find out "why". Ted Leung (apr 25) credited Danah Boyd (apr 18) credited Caterina (apr 11) credited David Chess (apr 11) credited long story short pier (apr 8) credited Elkin (apr 8) credited happy_potterer (apr 8) credited sternel (apr 7), who credited nobody in the post itself. The really bizarre thing is that after following this chain I looked at the comments for Sternel's post and somebody else posted a comment asking where Sternel got it from. So, onward: in the comments Sternel credits pegkerr (apr 8), credits kijjohnson (apr 7) credits mckitterick (apr 7) credits bobhowe (apr 7) credits both silvertide (apr 6) and curmudgeon (apr 6). Silvertide credits curmudgeon too. Curmudgeon credits kricker (apr 6) credits cynnerth (apr 6) and pbsage. PBSage also credits Cynnerth. Cynnerth credits seamusd whose journal I can't see. But now I can see the other self-acknowledged geek trying to track back this meme. Apparently it originated with some "find page 18, look at the fourth line" live journal post from who knows who.

Google has "about 15700" links for the search for "Find the fifth sentence" (in quotes) -- all of them blog entries with exactly this meme.