For those in the world who do not already know (where have you been?), last night in Namibia, Africa, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt welcomed their daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt to the world. The name Shiloh, means 'peaceful' in Hebrew.

It was reported that the first picture of the baby would fetch up to $3 million (£1.6m), with the proceeds being given to Unicef, for whom Jolie acts as an ambassador, and other projects in Africa.

Congratulations to both, and good for them using the media interest to help such worthy causes.

Closer to home, we welcomed our first Chinese profile on the site this weekend, and also a new advertising partner, AdBrite.

With AdBrite, you can now book your advert on our pages online, and pay a flat rate for either a day, week or the month. Sponsored Links are shown full time across all free profile pages in prime area directly beneath the profile itself, as well as above the fold in the "Cool Sites" section of the Blog, and at the bottom of the photo display grid.

To mark this auspicious weekend, we have set special low introductory rates. For maximum exposure, only 4 advertisers are allowed at any one time, so first come, first served. Book your ad now.

Word of mouth is the best type of advertising; its free, and a great idea, service or product can quickly reach millions of people when friends tell friends about it.

But it can also be one of the most difficult to achieve. We all have our networks of friends, but often they don't often want to be 'sold' our new product or business idea, regardless of how soft the sell. And how many will then tell their friends?

Enter the Million People Page. Instead of telling all your friends about your new website and just hoping they will find it exciting enough to pass on, why not add a profile, then invite them all to join in too - so you can all discover your six degrees of separation.

That way, not only will you get a great ranking on our site, but you also piggy back your favourite website onto a great viral one! One which your friends friends are much more likely to pass on. After all, giving your friends the opportunity to find out their six degrees of separation means there is something in it for them too...

And if you don't have a website to promote, you can just enjoy the fun of joining in and seeing how you are connected to the world!

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We welcomed our first Danish profile on the site this week, and the canny Scots are moving up the rankings as the word spreads in Edinburgh. We have an amazing 9 degrees of separation on the site already, and growing each day.

I have also recently added a visitor map to the site, so people can see where all our visitors are coming from.

Sorry, the movers screen and rankings data is all over the place today because I have tweaked the ranking algorithm so that it takes account of people who have made referral connections.

This is to ensure that the ranking system continues to work as originally intended, i.e. allowing the most connected people to move up the rankings, rather than just the most visually appealing (or unusual!) people who get lots of profile views.

The movers screen and ranking changes should straighten themselves out overnight when they are recalculated.

I think this new algorithm will make the ranking system fairer for those who join as time goes on, as well as emphasising one of the primary aims of the site - letting people discover their 'six degrees of separation'. This way, people can now proactively gain ranking by making connections, as well as by generating profile views.

Google has given us a pagerank of 5 - which shows us as an "important, high quality site". Which is even better news for people wanting to advertise their website via their profile.

The ranking system is starting to settle down nicely, with those people with the most referal links (and the most friends visiting their profile) moving up the rankings. In fact, our current number one ranked person moved from lowest to highest ranking in the space of a week by telling all his friends, so if you are on the site and haven't told all your friends yet - do it today!

We reached our first milestone yesterday - 100 people on the site, from 6 countries. These 100 people represent 100,000 of the worlds internet users, and 650,000 of the people in the world, and we have at least one example of '6 degrees of separation', so we are on track so far!

Thanks to everyone who has helped spread the world so far - there are still 1 billion more internet users out there who have not yet visited the site, so please continue to tell your friends!

Our traffic rank at Alexa got updated again, and we reached the top 37,000 sites on the internet today!




We also said Bonjour to our first French profile this week, and even got a mention on the The Times website technology section, which was pretty exciting.

Thanks to everyone who is spreading the word - please keep it up!

Our Alexa ranking has been updated again - not bad for a site which has only been online less than two months... and our daily traffic rank means we are the top 63,000 sites on the internet!

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!

Read an interesting blog entry by Richard Ball of Apogee Web Consulting in which he comments:

"The problem with [pixel advertising] sites is that they have little or no useful content. If you were launching a new magazine, you wouldn't have each page full of ads. Advertisers are looking for content that will attract visitors. Ads themselves aren't content. This is why I think pixel advertising will only survive if it evolves."

The Million People Page is primarily about people, and the connections between them. Ads (aka favourite websites) play an important role, but are a secondary focus to content (people), which is what makes The Million People Page an attractive proposition for people wanting to advertise their site.

In fact, an average 10% of our daily visitors are returning visitors, so not only are we building traffic (our daily traffic on Alexa this week has put us in the top 165,000 sites), but we are retaining it too. After all, people are more interesting than ads

As Richard is somewhat a guru on pixel advertising - being the author of a top ranked pixel ads lens on Squidoo - it was especially exciting to get an email from him with the suggestion that we show the top 100 pictures by default for a while to save people an extra click. So, thanks Richard!

I have added a nifty counter which people can add to their blog or webpage. It is automatically updated as each new profile is added, so you can easily keep track of the number of people on the site. The html you need to add is here:

<a title="The Million People Page" href="http://www.millionpeoplepage.com/"><img src="http://www.millionpeoplepage.com/images/counter.jpg" alt="The Million People Page - Progress Update" height="50" width="440" border="0"></a>

The counter displays like this:

I have been pretty happy with the response to the site so far - and with a full index in Google now, people are starting to find the site in searches. 30 people have added profiles so far - thats almost one every day the site has been online - and traffic has been steadily growing all week. Alexa has moved our traffic rank from an initial rank of 3,600,000 to 2,399,000 already, and our average this week puts us in the top million websites... Even better, our daily traffic rank even made us the 300,000th most popular site on the internet on Wednesday this week! Wow - that's the power of word of mouth!

But this site is all about people finding out who they are connected to - via six degrees of separation - so in order to really grow the number of connections quickly I have made payment optional for now. People who make a contribution with their profile order will have their profile added within 24/48 hours, and be listed with no adverts. All other profiles submitted are not guaranteed entry, and if listed, these profiles may contain ads.

I found myself awake at 4:30am this morning, thanks to a head cold, and despite a branded hot lemon drink, found I couldn't get back to sleep at all. So, out of sheer want of anything better to do whilst waiting for sunrise, I settled down to surf the net and see what was interesting people in the world.