Came across this fascinating image the other day, from the Internet Mapping Project. It shows all the major Internet Service Providers and how they are connected - sort of a six degrees of separation for the internet itself!

The Internet Mapping Project was started at Bell Labs in the summer of 1998, and it's goal is to acquire and save Internet topological data over a long period of time. This data has been used in the study of routing problems and changes, DDoS attacks, and graph theory.

The image is how I would imagine the people of the world being connected together - some well connected people linking lots of smaller groups of people together. When you contact your friends and ask them to check out your profile - and hopefully add their own - you are making the connections come alive. Who knows - perhaps you are one of the 'major ISPs' of the human population and will end up being our number one ranked person! Add a profile and find out!

This month I have selected Novel Twists as my website of the month. Not only is the website layout pretty cool, but so is the idea - to create a novel of 150 "pages", each written by a different author. Pages are reserved via auction to allow everyone a fair chance at the next page, and proceeds from the auction are being donated to a cancer charity.

We welcomed profiles from Singapore and South Africa this week, and after a very slow start, the number of people adding profiles is slowly starting to accelerate, as hoped. We are still way off target to get a million people, but we have had 35,000 visitors - so are well ahead of our target of one profile per 1000 unique visitors. In fact, one in 200 visitors creates a profile...

Not too bad for a website that is running almost exclusively on word of mouth, with no real advertising (it is just a bit of fun, after all). So please help to spread the word and tell your friends - there are still millions of internet users out there who have never visited!

The great thing about running a site like the Million People Page, is that I get to find out about great new websites. There are a couple that have caught my eye in the last month or so, and I thought I would highlight them.

TravelBeard
Ever wondered what to do with all your false beard holiday photos? Travel Beard is a site dedicated to the collection of fake beard holiday photos from all around the world. Yes, people take pictures of themselves in exotic locations wearing fake beards and then send them to the site for publication. At present, one of the TravelBeard regulars is trying to infiltrate the Swiss Alpine Beard Festival... Priceless!

Fake News
Fake News is a spoof news site that brings together some of the stuff that has been floating about on the internet in a very funny way. Even the ads on the site are spoofs... if you have had a serious day then a few minutes of fake news will bring a smile back to your face

For all you ranking junkies out there, I have added a new page on the site which shows the The Million People Page's biggest movers (up and down) on the site. This page will be updated when the rankings are recalculated each day.

Your change in ranking is also now shown on your profile page, so you can see how much you have moved up or down since the last ranking update.

Remember, your ranking on the site depends on the number of visitors to your profile, so by telling lots of people you are on the site you could be one of the movers and shakers too!

We had our first Irish visitor add a pixel profile today, and the picture was of the lady in question's gorgeous dog (in case you wonder why I am not linking individual profiles in this blog, it is to avoid any bias in rankings). The favourite website - The Million Dog Wall Project deserves a special mention however, as it is a not-for-profit pixel type site raising awareness for Animal Rights. I'm more of a cat person myself, but some of those pooches look very lovable.

I have also noticed a couple of Million People Page wannabes popping up in the last month (it was bound to happen). Most are not as featured as the original though and one of them is asking $5 per picture (with no profile)!

One other pixel site I came across worthy of mention is Million Dollar London. I love the twist on the original pixel advertising format with all the moving buses, taxis and tube trains. The homepage takes a fair bit of time to load, but it is worth it to hear the 'mind the gap'.

Reminds me of all the years I used to commute to the 'big smoke'...

My very canny wife, Heidi, had the idea of creating a 'Top Sites' page to make the favourite websites feature more prominent, and the site an even better advertising proposition for people primarily wanting to plug a website.

So, here are the top websites on the Million People Page. By Rank, lists the websites chosen by the top ranked people, and By Popularity selects the websites most often chosen by people on the site.

I have also relaxed the validation on the buy a pixel profile page so that only Country and email address are mandatory, as some of my friends let me know that they would love to join in, but were uncomfortable with the information they had to give. So you can leave out anything you don't want to include (like Birthday) or even the photo if you are camera shy. Email addresses are used for ordering purposes only and DO NOT form part of your profile.

On the press front, I have contacted some of the top UK news providers: BBC News; Sky News; and The Register, as well as my favourite magazine, BBC Focus, and radio station, Virgin Radio.

No responses yet, but ever the opimist...