The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by 21-year-old student Alex Tew from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 9 May 2009, it is 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and attempted extortion.
Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1503:
Christopher Columbus and his crew became the first Europeans to visit the Cayman Islands, naming them Las Tortugas after the numerous sea turtles there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayman_Islands
1824:
The National Gallery in London, which today houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900, opened to the public inside the former townhouse of the recently deceased art collector John Julius Angerstein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_%28London%29
1857:
The Sepoy Rebellion broke out in colonial India, threatening the rule of the British East India Company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
1869:
The golden spike ceremony was held at Promontory Summit, Utah, celebrating the completion of North America's First Transcontinental Railroad between the Missouri and Sacramento Rivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/golden_spike
1893:
For trade purposes under the Tariff Act of 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden
1924:
J. Edgar Hoover became the first director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
howbeit (adv): (archaic) Be that as it may; nevertheless http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/howbeit
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
We're one, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other... one. --Bono http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bono