Have I mentioned that I love the internet? I know you all know it, but I still don't say it enough. I'm just a very lucky guy. How do I love thee, internet? Let me count the ways: free shit.

That is all.

But oh, what a way it is! I remember the heady days of my freshman year, when venture capitalists blissfully handed sacks of money to legions of incompetent ASP programmers. In between rounds of Starcraft and Being Terrified Of Girls, I amassed piles of $1 DVDs and ill-fitting promotional t-shirts. It was a great time to be young and pale.

That well has dried up, but you can still find a great offer here and there; my enthusiasm for finding too-good-to-be-true deals on the internet is only slightly tempered by the knowledge that most of them are attempts by the Russian mafia to steal my credit card number and, if possible, internal organs.

But here's a free offer that seems to be on the up and up: freeipods.com. I know, I know. But it appears to be legit -- even trusted sources seem to say it's okay. Complete the requirements and you can get a 20GB iPod or a 4GB iPod mini shipped to you for free, for serious.

For those of you who haven't seen these links kicking around, the deal is pretty simple: sign up with the site, complete one of their free trial offers, and refer five friends who must do the same. The free trial offers are for things like credit cards, BMG's music club, a two week trial of Blockbuster's Netflix knockoff... that sort of stuff. Personally, I signed up with Ancestry.com's "14 days for $1" offer and my account was credited immediately. If I forget to cancel within 14 days I'll be out of a couple hundred dollars -- as you might have noticed, all of these "free" offers are of the sort that can net the companies offering them a lot of money if the signee isn't careful. But they're from reputable companies, and having set up free email and SMS reminders for myself at MemoToMe, I'm not too worried about forgetting.

The trick is the referrals, of course. Fulfilling an offer doesn't pay for your iPod, it pays for your referrer's iPod. The whole thing is a pyramid scheme; since you won't be out any money if you play properly, that isn't a bad thing. But it does mean that the so-called "conga line" sites, where people line up in message boards to refer one another, are useless for everyone but the first few people in line.

Which brings us to the title of this post. I'm taking the freeipods.com plunge -- if anyone feels like trying it out for themselves, here's my referral link. Conga lines can't work in the long run -- the last people to sign up won't get anything out of it, and the problem gets worse the bigger the list (bonus points to the first person who comes up with a function to express the number -- I suck at math). On the other hand, there's no benefit to having more than five referrals, it doesn't cost a participant anything to use someone else's referral, and the first few people really do benefit. And you can always bug your friends for referrals if the conga line fails you. So if you decide to join in, post your referral link in comments, and we'll see how many people we can help out.

Oh, and there's one catch you should know about: there's a limit of one iPod per household. So if you and your roommate both want to take advantage, you'll have to play your cards right -- you can't change your address once you sign up. I've got a sneaking suspicion that this has more to do with increasing the number of completed sponsor offers without increasing the number of iPods shipped than with any legal or practical requirements. With that in mind, I'll mention that if you live in say, apartment 3, your mailman will usually be able to figure out that a package addressed to apartment 3G should go to you (even if you live in a house). Promotional websites will not be able to figure this out. Not that I'd ever do something like that myself. Ahem.