We made a minor site update over the weekend, adding shortcut/accessibility keys to the main navigation. These work like windows shortcut keys, so that if you press ALT and the underlined letter in the menu item, you will be taken to that page. On a Mac, you hold down CTRL and the key.

So, for example, if you want to visit the homepage, you can press ALT-o (or CTRL-o on a Mac).

We passed the 200 profile milestone this week, and welcomed profiles from Italy and India.

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.

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!

Saw a fascinating programme on BBC2 this evening called Meltdown, in which Arctic scientific expedition organiser Paul Rose goes on a quest to find out whether global warming is a man made problem, or part of the natural climate cycle.

Using the same distributed platform as the Seti@home project, and running the same model that the Met Office uses to make daily weather forecasts, the project aims to use the spare computing cycles of people home pc's to crunch out thousands of variations of climate change models, to see if they can get a concensus on what might happen in the next 50 years - and if just 10,000 people join in, then there will be more processing power than the worlds best supercomputer!

The first results are due to be announced in May, so by joining in you can do your bit towards a greater understanding of global warming.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/climatechange

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!

I have enhanced the image upload facility so that images which are not square to start with are cropped to 90x90 pixels rather than squeezed. This should hopefully cut down some of the distortion in some people's photos, and means that it is no longer so important whether the photo is square to start with.

Yesterday was a busy day - 8 people added profiles - so looks like things are beginning to happen. Chains of referrals are starting to appear (we already have 4 degrees of separation on the site) and people are starting to change ranks as the profiles get viewed by new visitors.

No international profiles yet, so if you have any friends outside the UK, get them to add a pixel profile!

One of the most fascinating theories which prompted this site is that of the 6 degrees of separation - the theory that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else through an average of 6 other people.

To really test this theory as the site grows, I have enhanced the "referred by" feature so that it is possible to move up and down the chains of people more easily.

The more people you refer to the site, the more chains that will end up linking to you - imagine being able to click on a random person and then find out that you are connected to them via distant friends!

So, grab a photo of yourself, add yourself to the site, and then tell all your friends - who knows who you may be connected to!

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...

It was very exciting to login to my email over the weekend and see the first flurry of paypal receipts, plus a heap of emails from friends who think the idea is great. So, the homepage now shows a small pink line in the top left corner representing these pioneers, which you can click to reveal their photos and profiles.

Thanks to everyone for their support so far, and for those of you who have not yet added your profile - I know it is a big decision which photo to use, but the homepage will look much better with you on it! And remember to tell your friends.

After nearly a week of frantic keybashing on my Apple Mac in between clients, the Million People Page is finally born! The launch was marked by emailing all the people in my address book and issuing a press release.

The idea is to try and create a unique single page snapshot of the world's internet users and how they are connected. The Million People Page takes the original pixel advertising concept site 'The Million Dollar Homepage' by Alex Tew and adds a unique human twist (because humans are better than adverts).

By adding a photo and your details (which includes a 'favourite website' link for those who want to promote a website) and then emailing everyone you know (telling them your unique Person ID), the site will not only form a unique sample of the world population - the only place you can meet a million people! - but will also track the 6 degrees of separation of all the people on the site and the progress of your email.

So please, please, please, support this by buying a pixel profile for US $2 and then emailing all your friends and urging them to do the same. Or even if you don’t want to add your details, please still tell all the people you know. The result should be really cool, and the site should generate lots of interest, and will potentially be seen by millions of people over the coming years. Forget 15 minutes of fame - this is a minimum 5 years of fame (for you and your favourite website).

Thanks a million!
Rob